Canadian anal sex stats: the real data

This is one topic pulled out of our full Canadian sex statistics hub, kept on its own page so it's easier to find and cite directly.

General population and students

Source: Trojan/SIECCAN 2019 university student study (ages 18–24). Asked whether penis-anal intercourse occurred during the most recent sexual encounter — this question doesn't distinguish insertive from receptive, and the sample includes gay, bisexual, and straight students together, so a heterosexual man reporting insertive anal and a gay man reporting receptive anal both count toward the same number.

Source: a much larger study of 28,500 sexually active students across 41 Canadian postsecondary institutions. Gives a longer-term picture rather than just the most recent encounter: 8.2% had anal intercourse in the past 30 days, and another 29.0% had done it before but not in the past 30 days — together implying about 37.2% had ever had anal intercourse, and 62.8% never had.

Source: a smaller Canadian young-adult travel study, not nationally representative. Among participants describing their sexual behavior "at home," 16.8% of women and 32.4% of men reported anal sex.

What we could not find, and want to be direct about: a published Canadian statistic for married or heterosexual couples specifically. Statistics Canada's new 2024–2025 Canadian Sexual and Reproductive Health Survey explicitly asks women 18–49 about anal sex alongside marital status — but no published cross-tab exists yet as of this writing.

Gay and bisexual men

Source: the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), a general government health survey. 44.0% of gay/bisexual-identifying men reported anal sex with a man in the previous year.

Source: Sex Now, a survey that recruits heavily from gay/bi communities — a different, more sex-engaged sample, not a more "correct" number. 78.8% reported anal sex with a man in just the previous 6 months. Researchers attribute the gap partly to general health surveys under-reporting sensitive behavior and partly to Sex Now's more sexually active, self-selected recruitment — a methodological lesson, not a contradiction.

Source: EMIS-2017 (Canadian gay/bi/MSM sample, n=5,165). Among participants with casual male partners, 62.1% reported anal intercourse with those partners in the previous year, and among that group, 73.6% reported inconsistent condom use.

Source: a Montreal MSM surveillance study, measuring by sexual episode. 57.7% of episodes with a "couple partner" involved anal sex, versus 43.1% with a non-couple partner.

Source: a Vancouver GBM study analyzing 2,513 sexual-partner events — the most detailed Canadian breakdown of anal role we found:

Condom use by role, same study: receptive with a condom, 18.6%; insertive with a condom, 17.4%. All of the above in this section describes gay/bisexual/MSM Canadians specifically, not Canadian men generally.

Straight men, receptive anal sex, and pegging

We could not find a representative Canadian study answering this question at all — a genuine gap, not an oversight. The closest comparison is a 2025 U.S. study of 964 cisgender adults, which defined receptive anal penetration broadly — by penis, finger, tongue, or toy:

That 17% figure does not mean "17% have been pegged" — fingers, toys, and oral contact all qualify under the study's broad definition. On pegging specifically: we found no credible peer-reviewed population study, Canadian or otherwise. A commonly repeated "16% of adults have tried pegging" figure traces back to proprietary research from a commercial sex-information site, not a peer-reviewed population study — we're not using it.

Sources

• Trojan/SIECCAN, 2019 Sexual Health of Canadian University Students Study. Preliminary report (PDF).
• 28,500-student postsecondary study across 41 Canadian institutions, published on PMC.
• Canadian young-adult traveler survey, published on PMC.
• CCHS vs. Sex Now comparison, published on PMC.
• EMIS-2017 Canadian results, published on PMC.
• Lambert et al., "Correlates of Unprotected Anal Sex at Last Sexual Episode: Analysis from a Surveillance Study of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Montreal," AIDS and Behavior, 2011.
• Vancouver GBM event-level analysis, published on PMC.