How Many Canadian Veterans of WW2 Are Still Alive Today?

You’re living at a time when Canada’s living link to the Second World War is almost gone. Veterans Affairs Canada projects that by 2025, only about 3,691 Canadian WWII veterans will still be alive, down from tens of thousands just a few years ago. All are in their 90s or older, with an average age over 95. If you want to understand who they are, where they live, and why their numbers are shrinking so fast, keep going.

Key Takeaways

• As of 2025, about 3,691 Canadian Second World War veterans are still alive.
• All surviving Canadian WWII veterans are now in their 90s or older, with an average age over 95.
• The number of living WWII veterans is dropping rapidly, from tens of thousands in 2021 to under 4,000 by 2025.
• Veterans Affairs Canada estimates these figures using administrative records, updated annually as of March 31.
• Most remaining Canadian WWII veterans live in Ontario and major urban centres like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, where healthcare and support are concentrated.

How Many Canadian WWII Veterans Are Alive Today?

These numbers highlight how quickly their generation’s disappearing.

In March 2022, there were 20,273 War Service Veterans (WWII and Korea combined); by 2025, only 3,691 WWII veterans remain. In 2024, a ceremony at Juno Beach marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day and underscored the federal government’s emphasis on veterans’ contributions.]

Compared with about 45,418 surviving American WWII veterans, Canada’s total is far smaller and falling daily.

Where Canada’s Remaining WWII Veterans Live

As the overall number of Canadian WWII veterans falls, where they’ve chosen to spend their final years matters more than ever. You’ll find the largest remaining clusters in Ontario, which acts as a national hub and includes the Niagara region home to Canada’s oldest known WWII veteran. Many of these veterans once served in domestic roles with the Veterans Guard, guarding installations and internment camps across Canada during the war.

Major cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal likely hold higher concentrations because they offer dense healthcare networks, long‑term care homes, and veterans’ services.

Major cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal remain magnets, concentrating veterans around dense care and support networks

You also see veterans scattered across prairie and Atlantic communities, where local memorials, legion branches, and Veterans Affairs offices still support smaller groups. Historical burial records in places like Thunder Bay and Victoria show how veterans gravitated to established population centers, a pattern that continues as they move closer to hospitals and specialized geriatric care.

Post‑war migration toward family ties and employment in urban areas largely shaped this map, leaving a dispersed but traceable national footprint.

How Old Are Canada’s Remaining WWII Veterans (and by Gender)?

Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Canada’s remaining WWII veterans form an exceptionally old and rapidly shrinking group.

Because the war ended in 1945, every surviving veteran you count today is in their 90s or older, with the average age now well past 95. Their numbers form part of the broader Canadian Veteran population counted in the 2021 Census, which totaled 461,240 when including all eras of service.

You can see this extreme age profile in individuals like Burdett Sisler, who turned 110 in 2025, becoming both Canada’s oldest veteran and its oldest living citizen.

He represents the far edge of a cohort that’s disappearing faster each year as age-related deaths accelerate.

Out of the 3,691 veterans alive in 2025, 3,024 are men and 667 are women, so women make up about 18% of the total.

That share reflects wartime enlistment patterns, not differences in longevity: male and female veterans today reach similar very advanced ages, with only a few thousand of either gender left.

How Veterans Affairs Canada Counts WWII Survivors

Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) counts surviving Second World War veterans through a tightly defined system that separates them from other groups it serves. You’re not just seeing a rough guess; VAC builds its estimates from administrative data tied to benefits and services. As the war recedes further into history, VAC’s latest figures underline how few remain, with fewer than 3,700 Canadian WWII veterans still alive as of 2025.

VAC first classifies people as War Service Veterans if they served in the Second World War or Korea, then separates those WWII veterans from Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and RCMP veterans. It uses March 31 each year as the key “snapshot” date, then projects forward. That’s how VAC arrives at its 2025 figure of 3,691 living WWII veterans—667 women and 3,024 men—out of more than 1 million who once served.

To understand what these numbers represent, you need to remember:

• Each veteran is counted as a client, not a file.
• Veterans and survivors appear in combined demographic tables.
• War Service Veterans and their survivors are tracked separately.
• Annual age averages drive future decline projections.

Why Canada Is Losing Its WWII Veterans So Quickly

Those careful counts from Veterans Affairs Canada don’t just tell you how many Second World War veterans remain; they show how fast an entire generation is disappearing.

By 2025, only 3,691 are still alive in Canada, most in their 90s or older, with a few reaching 100 and even 110. At those ages, you’re not seeing a gradual decline; you’re watching the steep end of the survival curve. Public ceremonies on Remembrance Day, from the National War Memorial in Ottawa to local cenotaphs across the country, underline how the dwindling number of WWII veterans is turning lived experience into distant history.

You can trace the speed of the loss directly to the calendar. The war ended 80 years ago, so every veteran now belongs to one of the most fragile age groups.

That’s why the roll call shrank from tens of thousands in 2021 to under 3,700 by Remembrance Day 2025.

You also see the same pattern in the United States: only about 45,418 of 16.4 million served remain, with daily deaths erasing living memory everywhere at once.

Conclusion

When you look at the numbers, you see more than statistics—you see the last living links to Canada’s role in WWII. Each year, their ranks shrink faster, and the window to hear their stories closes a little more. If you’re going to listen, thank, and learn from them, you’ve got to do it now. Because in just a few years, “how many are left?” will quietly become “none.”