With a tip of the bowler to David Campbell, here’s a table showing the ratio of live births to deaths, by province, for the selected years, courtesy of of the good folks at the Dominion statistics bureau, currently d.b.a. Statistics Canada.
| Province | 1999-2000 | 2007-2008 |
| NL | 1.20 | 0.94 |
| PE | 1.29 | 1.18 |
| NS | 1.22 | 1.00 |
| NB | 1.26 | 1.11 |
| QC | 1.40 | 1.53 |
| ON | 1.62 | 1.54 |
| MB | 1.48 | 1.48 |
| SK | 1.40 | 1.36 |
| AB | 2.22 | 2.32 |
| BC | 1.50 | 1.38 |
Campbell explains the figures this way: for every death that occurred in a province in the given year, there was the number of births shown in the table. So in Alberta, for example, for every death, there were more than two births.
Most provinces have been stable.
In Atlantic Canada the figures have been going down and in Newfoundland and Labrador the decline was the worst of all. We don’t have enough babies to replace our deaths on a one for one basis.
The reason is simple: young people of child-bearing age leave for somewhere else. This has not changed at all, despite the claims that the number of live births the past couple of years has gone up. People are still croaking at at least the same rough rate. And once the economy everywhere else settles down and starts to grow the normal patterns will resume. The folks who have come home to seek shelter during the storm will venture out once more to foreign lands, to return - if at all – once they have retired.
There are a couple of observations on this. First, it is a reminder that the demographic issue is still with us and needs to be addressed.
Second, as far as the number of workers goes, this is not really much of an issue. if there was economic activity here, people would be staying. And if they didn’t stay others would come here to replace them.
But that isn’t happening.
This is where you notice the general lack of growth locally and recall the number of projects that were supposed to happen but that died.
And then you realise the number of times cabinet ministers talked about slowing down development or – in the case of Hebron – letting work go because we could never do it all here anyway.
Sure we could; as in Alberta, we’d open the doors to people willing to come and do the work. But that didn’t happen.
Just think about that for a second.
We actually had people talking about foregoing development or slowing the pace of development in order to avoid something. That “something” wasn’t overheating the economy or crime, housing crises or anything of the sort.
Nope.
There must have been some other reason why people thought letting opportunity slip by would be a good idea.
-srbp-