According to the Estonian Population Registry, 3,054 Estonian citizens live permanently in Canada. Globally, 121,243 Estonian citizens live outside of Estonia. The majority of Estonian citizens abroad live in Estonia's neighboring countries. Finland boasts 54,084 (44.6%) Estonian citizens and Russia 19,172 (15.8%). These two countries are followed by the United Kingdom (9,537 or 4.6%), Germany (5,588 or 4.6%) and Sweden (5,038 or 4.2%).
Countries that took in most of the Estonian refugees after the World War II fair somewhat lower. There are 4,803 (4%) Estonian citizens in the USA, 3,054 (2.5%) in Canada and 2,996 (2.5%) in Australia.
According to Enel Pungas, Head of the Population Facts Department of the Ministry of the Interior, these figures correspond to the number of people who have applied for Estonian identity documents abroad and who have indicated an address outside of Estonia as their permanent residence.
There are no reliable global statistics about people who identify themselves as Estonian. According to the 2016 Census of Canada, 24,530 people of Estonian origin lived in Canada, most of them in Ontario (15,075 or 61.5%), British Columbia (4,840 or 19.7%) and Alberta (2,720 or 11.1%).
