Call the Yukon the Land of Lone Wolves.

Residing alone is the most common living situation in the territory, with one-person households accounting 32.2 per cent of private homes, according to 2016 census data on families and households released Wednesday.

The Yukon comes in a close second to Quebec, which, at 32.3 per cent, has the highest percentage of one-person households in Canada.

This is not a new phenomenon.

Quebec and the Yukon have placed first and second respectively for the greatest percentage of single-person households since 1981, Gary Brown, senior information officer with the Yukon Bureau of Statistics, told the Star.

Though Brown can’t say, definitively, why the Yukon ranks so high, he knows of some theories.

“One is that some of our workforce is fairly transient: people coming up for a job and just living by themselves,” he said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

“Another is there’s high income levels here and so people are able to live alone.”

Brown cautioned that the bureau does not have strong data to back up these theories.

Nunavut had the smallest percentage people living alone, with 18.9 per cent of households comprising one person.

The national average was 28.2 per cent.

Karol Campbell is the president of the Yukon Real Estate Association.

She’s seen “quite a number of single people” purchasing homes in the territory.

“I’ve had a number of clients that have been on their own, of all age groups,” she said Wednesday.

Younger people buying their first home often rent out their basement or a room in the house to help supplement mortgage payments, she said.

With Whitehorse’s high rents, Campbell supposes that people find it more economical to invest in property than to lease.

“I can speak personally, people I know, that it was a wiser option to go into home ownership and pay your mortgage than to deal with some of the rents that are out there, because they’re pretty steep,” she said.

The second most common living arrangement in the Yukon was couples without children, cheekily referred to as D.I.N.K.s: Double Income, No Kids.

Childless couples made up 43.1 per cent of Yukon households.

At the same time, the number of couples with children grew more in the Yukon, Nunavut and the Prairies than elsewhere in Canada, partly because of higher fertility, said the Statistics Canada report.

It added that Alberta saw an influx of young people moving to the province from other parts of Canada, which contributed to a rise in couples with children in that jurisdiction.

In Canada as a whole, the number of cohabiting couples without children rose faster (by 7.2 per cent) than couples with children (up 2.3 per cent).

In 2016, 51.1 per cent of couples lived with at least one child, the lowest percentage on record.

This in part due to Canada’s aging population, says Statistics Canada.

Children of baby-boomers are mostly adults now and are moving out of their parents’ homes.

At the same time, it has become increasingly popular in Canada for young adults, age 20 to 34, to live with at least one parent.

This was the case for 34.7 per cent of young adults in 2016.

In the Yukon, lone-parent families accounted for 17 per cent of households, which is slightly higher than the national average of 14.5 per cent.

The Yukon also had a relatively high percentage of common-law partnerships.

At 31.9 per cent of couples, the territory ranked fourth for common-law unions, behind Nunavut (50.3 per cent), Quebec (39.9 per cent) and Northwest Territories (36.6 per cent).

Same-sex couples made up 0.6 per cent of married couples and 2.5 per cent of common-law partnerships in the Yukon.

In Canada overall, 0.9 per cent of partnerships were same-sex couples.

The 2016 census found that about half of Canada’s same-sex couples lived in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, or Ottawa-Gatineau.