This week in an interview with the Georgia Straight, a development-industry representative said that the regional population will grow 65,000 per year until 2021.

Urban Development Institute president and CEO Anne McMullen based this on information in a City of Vancouver staff report, which cited Metro Vancouver's regional growth strategy.

It sounded official because it was in an official document. But this 65,000 per year figure appears to be inaccurate.

That was made clear in an email from Metro Vancouver communications staffer Kelly Sinoski. She maintained that the regional growth strategy states that the population in Metro Vancouver will rise by 30,000 per year until 2021.

So how did the city include the whopping number of 65,000 per year—more than double the regional government's estimate?

It's quite simple, actually. A city staffer subtracted the census count for 2016 from the regional government's population forecast for 2021.

Then this city staffer divided that figure by five to conclude the number of new residents each year.

The City of Vancouver has since revised its population forecast downward in the Housing Vancouver Strategy.

This is "to defer to the Metro Vancouver forecast" that the regional population will rise 18 percent from 2,356,000 in 2011 to 2,788,000 by 2021.

That adds up to an increase of 43,200 per year.

The city's forecast is still significantly above the 30,000 per year cited by Metro Vancouver's Sinoski.

Meanwhile, the City of Vancouver expects its population to rise 11 percent from 617,200 in 2011 to 685,000 in 2021.

In the 2016 federal census, Vancouver's population was 631,486, which was an increase of 4.6 percent over the previous five years. The city is anticipating an eight percent rise from 2016 to 2021.