As we told you a couple of weeks ago, it doesn’t look like the provincial government’s policy of paying cash for live births produced any improvement in the birthrate in the province except for the year they announced the bonus cash.
When you look at the birth rate by age of mother some other interesting things appear.
Let’s start with the 20-somethings. Note: this is a revised version of the post. The original post was based on the wrong Statistics Canada tables.
This graph will likely cause some people to scratch their chins or heads. The reason is simple: it isn’t the story they’ve been told, namely the one that holds that all our ills of outmigration and the like vanished after 2003.
In fact, if you look at it, outmigration from Newfoundland and Labrador to Alberta has been greatest over the last 10 years or so.
Only the naive or the demented would portray the looming labour crunch in the province as a “tremendous opportunity”.
A report released on Wednesday by the provincial human resources department forecasts that by 2020 - less than a decade from now - there will be 70,000 vacant jobs in the province. They will be in all sectors of the economy. They will be in all areas of the province.
The primary cause of the vacancies will be retirements. Only 10% of the vacancies will come from employment growth, that is from new job creation.
This is not an opportunity of any sort. Newfoundland and Labrador will face a labour shortage at the same time as the rest of North America will go through the same problem. Many of the jobs will remain vacant because there won’t be anyone to fill the positions. Some other provinces, notably Quebec, will face a far worse situation.
This is a situation that the provincial government, labour unions and businesses have seen coming for more than a decade. So far, they have done nothing about it except talk about it. Now the problem is here.
It represents a very real financial problem for the provincial government. As baby boomers retire, some costs like health care will increase dramatically. At the same time, revenue sources will drop off as there are fewer people working to produce taxes and other sources of government revenue. Increasing the number people drawing a government paycheque may look good for votes in the short-term, but when you look at the big picture, you can see just exactly how grossly irresponsible the current administration has been for the past seven years.
Regular readers of these scribbles will be very familiar with the implications of the looming labour crunch. Unsound financial management by the current administration promises to make the problem much worse than it would have been if people in responsible government positions had acted instead of talking before now. The Muskrat Falls megadebt project looks even stupid in this context than it does standing on its own.
Only the naive or the demented would look on this as anything positive.
Government, labour unions and business leaders have seen this coming and they’ve done nothing about it except talk.
On Wednesday, they carried on as if nothing happened.
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Recent population figures from Statistics Canada suggest the recession is over and things are getting back to normal.
Population in Newfoundland and Labrador dropped in the last quarter primarily due to out-migration.
Regular readers of these e-scribbles will be familiar with the point.
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Newfoundland and Labrador’s population dropped again in the third quarter of 2010, according to the latest estimates from Statistics Canada.
International migration is up, but wasn’t enough to pull things into the growth category.
Could it mean that the recession is over?
Well, at least it could be over to the extent that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are feeling comfortable enough to venture off - again - to Alberta or Ontario or wherever it is they will go to find work. The growth in population from the second quarter of 2007 onward is attributable to the North American recession. As in previous recessions, outmigration from the province halted and more ex-pats started flowing back in as the economy slowed down.
That pattern started to change a the middle of 2009.
For those like finance minister Tom Marshall and his colleagues in the provincial cabinet - who tried to imagine this was due to the attractiveness of local economic opportunities - these figures are bad news. They confirm that their interpretation is wrong. If their view was correct, the population ought to be growing at a much greater rate than it has been for the past year or so. Locals would be finding work and staying while more people would come from outside to take up the extra jobs created by a booming economy that somehow managed to escape the ravages of the worst recessions since the 1930s.
Short answer: it didn’t. And to go with that there are still some major economic problems in the province that the politicians aren’t talking about. Let’s see if they start talking about them in 2011.
As a last point, as you can see from this second chart, the population of the province has dropped more often each quarter than it has grown over the past five years. And if you were to extend that back to 2003, you’d see the downward trend continues. In fact, the trend goes back before 2003.
So much for the government’s pronatalist policy.
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Supposedly, there’s a baby boom in the province:
After years in decline, Newfoundland and Labrador’s birth rate has been steadily increasing in recent years — and the trend is expected to continue this year.
There isn’t really.
A steady increase or a boom.
And it isn’t clear from the Telegram front page story who expects the trend to continue.
First, the numbers.
In 2008, the number of live births in the province jumped by 300 to 4,905. In 2009, the number went up again by 35. That’s not a steady increase. It’s a big jump and then a tiny increase that is actually less than 10% of the total number of live births. Put another way, that’s almost a seven percent increase the first year and a point seven percent increase – 0.7% (less than one percent) - the next year.
This is not a trend.
It’s curious but it isn’t a trend.
As for what will happen in 2010, look at it this way: In 2008 and 2009, there were on average about 410 live births each month in the province, give or take. If the same birth rate carried on into 2010, we’d expect to see about 3900 live births by the middle of September (410 times 9.5) As the Telegram notes, we’ve only reached 3300 or so by that time in 2010.
So unless people were making like bunnies nine or 10 months ago or there are a crop of twins and trips out there no one really has talked up, the provincial birth rate seems to be on track to come in well below the 2008 and 2009 figure. That’s even allowing that October is one of the big baby months according to some analysis. In fact, if the current trend holds, the birth rate might well be back to where it was in 2007: around 4500 live births.
As for the Telly claim that someone expects the growth trend to continue, there’s no one quoted in the article who actually says that. The Telly article includes a reference to a 2009 news release by the provincial centre for health information, but your humble e-scribbler had a few choice words about that piece and its dubious commentary when it came out.
The article also makes an obligatory mention of the provincial government’s breeding incentive program. That’s the one Danny Williams announced during the 2007 campaign with the infamous quote “we can’t be a dying race”, but that’s another story.
Basically, there’s a cash bounty of $1,000 for every live birth or adoption in the province. Aside from the fact these sorts of programs don’t usually work, this one isn’t likely the cause for the spike in births since it doesn’t really change what the provincial government’s own statistics agency identified as long term trends affecting the population:
The number of births has been trending downward for four decades because of declining fertility rates and, more recently, a decline in the number of women of child-bearing age.
A grand for successful copulation doesn’t really get at the core problem fewer people at the right age to have children wanting fewer children than previous generations.
Most likely, the two year increase in live birth rates came from the increase in migration that started in 2007. All those young people who moved home to escape the recession may well have decided to carry on with their lives and have babies. Since out-migration seems to have picked up again, it would only make sense that the birth rate is down, as the Telegram’s statistics suggest.
The real stunning figures from the Telegram article though – and in some respects the real story – are in the print edition but not in the online version. In print, the Telly gave registered births in selected communities in 2009 and from January to September 2010. Labrador City, with about 8,000 people there and in neighbouring Wabush saw only 88 births registered in 2009. Bonavista had none in 2009 and has had two so far in 2010. Corner Brook (2006 population = 20,083) saw 650 births in 2009. meanwhile, St. John’s and its 100,000 or so residents registered 2629 births in 2009. For those keeping track that was 53% of the total number of live births in the province that year.
Outside the St. John’s census metropolitan region, large swaths of Newfoundland and Labrador are basically devoid of people under 50 years of age. Once bustling communities are collections of retirement homes. And in places like Grand falls-Windsor or Deer Lake, the local construction “boom” is pretty well all from retirees returning to the province from outside or people from smaller communities along the coast heading into the major centres.
What the demographic trends mean for the province is way more interesting than a minor – and temporary – shift in the birth rate. It’s also a subject the local crop of politicians, from the Old Man on down, quite clearly don’t have a sweet clue what to do about.
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Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province to experience a population loss in the second quarter of 2010, according to figures released Wednesday by Statistics Canada. The cause is primarily net interprovincial outflows, in other words outmigration. That’s also the first drop since 2008.
While the provincial government issued a news released last quarter trumpeting the gain of a mere 96 people, you are unlikely to see a release like it this month talking about a drop three times the size.
Here’s what the past five years looks like, by quarter.
Now it could be nothing at all but a blip. Then again, it could be a sign of things to come. Note that for the last three quarters the rate of growth has dropped dramatically. That suggests the steam was going out of things and that the Q1 results were the peak of the curve.
You can see that more clearly if you look at this chart:
In less than a year, the province went from gaining 130 people in a quarter to losing 300.
And actually, this could also mean that the North American economy is on solid footing. The change in migration patterns for Newfoundland and Labrador in Q3 2007 actually heralded the onset of the recession. A long-term analysis of provincial population suggests that the population grows shortly before major recession. Those are all people working elsewhere with relatively weak ties to the community who opt to come back to the province to weather the economic storm. When things pick up, they head off again.
And as much as the province’s finance minister may like to believe otherwise, odds are that is what’s going on again.
Great news, wot?
Well, not really. The longer term demographic problems that come with that aren’t ones the current administration and its unsound financial and economic management are not ready to cope with. Not by a long shot.
Don’t forget that in this pre-election and pre-leadership period, you can bet the government won’t be willing or able to do much to start adjusting to cope with the harsh reality of the economy and demographics. In fact, the next 18 months are basically a write-off for serious government decisions to deal with the problem.
On top of that you can forget the period between the election and whenever the new Premier arrives to replace the Old Man. And if that doesn’t wind up happening happen until a couple of years before the 2015 election you can almost write off dramatic policy shifts until that election is history as well.
Wow.
Not to worry sez you. There’s oil.
Sure there is.
Unfortunately, production and royalties won’t be able to cope with the demand for added revenue. There’s not much else going on to take up the slack and for good measure, the current administration plans to use oil money to fuel increases for education and health care and use exactly the same money to build the $14 billion Lower Churchill project.
Here’s lookin’ at you, kid…
…as you leave the province again.
At least we’ll always have Ottawa.
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From a Globe and Mail article on some of the human consequences of the Irish economic disaster:
After almost 20 years as Europe’s strongest economy, during which hundreds of thousands of Polish, British and North American immigrants flocked to Dublin for work, the Irish are once again a nation of emigrants. Moving abroad, a response to the economic calamities of the past 170 years, has once again become the way out of an impossible situation at home, and is creating a new Irish diaspora.
Statistics show that the shift from an immigrant-receiving population to a largely outgoing one began just as Ireland suffered the continent’s most precipitous economic collapse – a freefall that began with the collapse of a real-estate bubble, which in turn set off bank collapses and government-debt emergencies. The result has been double-digit unemployment.
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As labradore has been putting it in a series of posts, the provincial public service in the first half of 2010 comprises 53,780 people working directly for the provincial government, the university and public colleges, health care authorities and public school boards.
That works out to 26.2% of the working people of the province. That’s double the comparable percentage for all 10 provinces.
And here’s the truly unsettling bit:
In the thirty years in which Statistics Canada has measured public sector employment, the percentage of employed people in Newfoundland and Labrador labour force who are employed in the provincial public sector has never been this high.
Those 53,780 comprise 21% of the entire labour force and, once again, that’s the highest this percentage has been in the three decades that Statistics Canada has been measuring public sector employment.
And they make up about 10% of the entire population of the province.
That’s a pretty sharp contrast to the talk in 2004. As CBC reported, Danny Williams’ first budget forecast a cut of 4,000 public service positions. By 2005, that planned cut disappeared. The planned cuts have evidently been replaced with a pretty hefty hiring plan.
Now if the private sector had grown at a similar or greater pace, there wouldn’t be so cause for concern. As the job numbers show, though, the proportion of the labour force employed in the public sector has grown to an amazing level. in some regions of the province – like, say, Grand Falls-Windsor - the provincial public service is the major employer.
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For seven successive quarters now, there has been a net inflow of people to the province,” said the Honourable Tom Marshall, Minister of Finance and President of Treasury Board. “This sustained gain is encouraging, and an indication that more people recognize and have confidence in the opportunities offered in Newfoundland and Labrador.”Sure enough, if you take the Statistics Canada numbers and graph them you will see what appears to be a net increase in population over time.
Here you’ll find something decidedly less comforting. Not only has there been a net loss in population over time, you can notice that there has been a rather precipitous drop in the rate of increase over the last three quarters. in other words, while the population is going up each quarter, it is going by less and less. First it was about 1350 or so in the second and third quarter of last year, then 533 and then a mere 96 for the first quarter of 2010.Last week, for instance, the government crowed that it had nearly demolished the projections for the 2009-10 deficit, overspending by just $1-billion instead of the nearly $5-billion expected. The reason, however, was due to higher-than-expected royalty revenues from the oil sands, and not more careful fiscal management in Edmonton, where spending continues to swell. This year's projected deficit is still heading toward breaking red-ink records, unless serendipity again intervenes.There are other economic indicators to examine, as the Post piece notes, but just think about what it means when a provincial government crows about a net growth in population of a mere 96 people after a loss of 10,000 in two years.
Don’t worry.
You read that correctly.
Statistics Canada estimates the population in Newfoundland and Labrador went from an estimated 510,805 to estimated 510,901.
96 people.
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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.
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Some of you may have missed a couple of stories that highlight the impact demographics – the aging population – will have on government budgets.
The federal parliamentary budget officer is warning that the federal government is facing a pretty serious “structural” imbalance that won’t be solved by simple budget cuts. As the Toronto Star reported:
Canada's falling birth rate coupled with baby boomers approaching retirement will "fundamentally" change the labour market for decades to come. In the next 10 years alone, the number of people who are retired compared to those still in the workforce will grow by 7 per cent – as much as it grew in the last four decades.
Retired workers pay less tax and draw more on programs like health care and seniors' benefits, driving up government costs.
Page said "permanent fiscal actions – either through increased taxes or reduced program spending, or some combination of both" will be needed to avoid ever-increasing government deficits.
The best line of all has a very familiar ring to it:
"The government's current fiscal structure is not sustainable over the long term," the report said.
Meanwhile, Quebec’s long standing pro-natalist policies won’t really deal with the very same problem in that province:
Bonne nouvelle : le Québec connaît depuis deux ans un petit baby-boom. Mauvaise nouvelle : il survient trop tard et sera donc loin d'être suffisant pour contrer l'effet de l'arrivée à la retraite de la génération du « vrai » baby-boom. Quand les bébés qui sont aujourd'hui dans leurs poussettes intégreront le marché du travail, ils ne seront jamais assez nombreux pour payer les pensions et les soins de santé de ceux qui s'appuieront alors sur une marchette !
Now these same issues will affect Newfoundland and Labrador, just as surely as the province never escaped the ravages of the current recession.
But how they will affect the province and what needs to be done are subjects for another post.
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According to finance minister Tom Marshall, estimated growth in the province’s population is due to people flocking home to find work.
“More people moving to Newfoundland and Labrador represents a further sign of confidence in our economy, way of life and the plan the Williams Government has put in place to continue along a path of stability and prosperity,” said Minister Marshall.
Okay.
They are being drawn to the province by its supposedly buoyant economic prospects, right?
Well, if that’s the case, the good spin-doctor of finance might want to explain why the employment levels in the province in November were actually lower than they were the year before.
Wait.
Don’t bother asking.
The answer is readily apparent.
People are leaving places like Alberta because there are fewer job prospects there than there used to be.
That’s a trend some people have noticed for some time now. In other words, the growth in the provincial population over the last year and a half or so is actually not due to all the splendiferous tax cuts and other budgetary bunkum the provincial government spin machine claimed.
Even if some bank economists have been fooled - badly – the reality is something other than what the provincial government claims and the conventional media dutifully reports.
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The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies today released its updated 1998 demographic study for the Atlantic provinces.
Not surprisingly they confirmed the demographics trends for this province over the next three decades that have been known publicly since the early to mid-1990s in this province.
"While slower growth and aging affect the labour force, and hence a region's ability to generate output and income, they also affect virtually all other aspects of the economy. They affect patterns of saving and household consumption, and hence investment. They have differential effects on sales, production, and investment levels in different industries, and their impact thus falls unevenly on different areas within a region. They affect the tax bases from which provincial governments must draw revenue, and they affect the demands for government program expenditures. Work carried out in other contexts suggests the feasibility and importance of anticipating the effects of population change on government expenditures."
Those trends and the financial implications for government are nothing knew for regular Bond Papers readers.
This sort of information is one of the reasons why this corner of the Intern long ago branded government spending as unsound and unsustainable.
It just took them three years to figure it out.
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labradore does yet another commendable job on demographics and recent population increases.
He also dissects the former finance minister’s guarded language when attributing the in-migration trends to a cause.
Basically, Jerome doesn’t.
He talks instead about things that will happen manana.
Tomorrow is a very important concept in the language of Newfoundland politics. it is when things happen. Unlike American politics where happy days are here again, Newfoundland politics is a place where good things will come tomorrow.
We must be ready for a better tomorrow.
Today is a chore to be endured until tomorrow.
Today there must be cuts in health care and so forth, but it will be all worth it, tomorrow.
There are lessons to be learned from here or there that will prepare us for the rapture coming tomorrow.
The Lower Churchill is on the way. It gets here tomorrow just as it has been getting here tomorrow for 40 years now. Some people aren’t attuned to the local political argot and so get taken for a ride. It’s especially wonderful to read the post on selective perception from 2006 and note the issues that still dog the Lower Churchill three years after the most recent political resurrection of this golem.
Heck, in one sense, Tom Rideout can hardly be faulted for thinking one June that tomorrow was actually four months away.
And tomorrow as we all know is a day that never arrives anyway. When it does get here it is actually “today”.
Yet for all that, people still wonder why Alice in Wonderland is a good metaphor for Newfoundland politics.
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it took a bit but labradore has laid waste to the latest bit of silliness coming from some quarters about the Glorious Growth of In-Migration.
There’s even a nice little graph that shows that since 1961 upticks in in-migration coincide with recessions. Not surprisingly, the most recent uptick is the biggest and coincides with what the late lamented Tory Trevor Taylor described as the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The diaspora returneth not to the homeland after all, it seems.
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labradore may do more of his own with this, but in the meantime, it’s useful to steal his observations on the most recent quarterly population statistics.
He left them at Townie Bastard’s corner. Some people, including local media, took the wrong perspective which is not surprising since the StatsCan release wasn’t very clear on what’s been happening in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Anyway, here’s Wally’s take on things. Bear in mind he accurately predicted a recession in 2008 by noting the sudden change in in-migration and hence in population that took place in mid-2007:
The population bump from in-migration happens during every recession.
Out-migration hasn't really slowed down. Actually, it hasn't slowed down at all. International migration is stable at best; the last two quarters have been slightly worse for international immigration than the same time last year.
And the imbalance of deaths over births is trending in death's favour. This was the third consecutive quarter of natural population decline (more deaths than births). Six of the last seven, and eight of the past eleven quarters have seen negative natural population change. One more quarter, and there'll have been a full year of it - the first time for any province, I believe.The only thing that's causing population growth is net in-migration, largely driven by people moving in from Alberta and Ontario.
Two guesses as to what's driving that. First doesn't count.
Now anyone who looks at the release and stopped for a second might have noticed that the increase was only about one quarter of one percent. And if that person had clicked back to the release before, he or she might have noticed the previous quarter where population declined in Newfoundland and Labrador.
But those wider points – about persistent out-migration and the deaths/births ratio – require a level of analysis that reporters just don’t have time to do.
Sadly for the reporting world, that’s where the real story sits.
You can find it over at labradore.
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Predictable Update: You won't find the real story in a provincial government news release, as Jerome!'s effort Wednesday morning confirms.
when Newfoundland and Labrador’s population drops by one half of one percent would be like waiting for government to lower gas prices by half a cent.
Not gonna happen.
But government will raise prices by a little more than a quarter of a cent. Such is the sensitivity of the government gas pricing fixing scheme when the prices aren’t in the consumer interest.
And cabinet ministers will issue news releases when the population estimates go up by a comparably small amount. Last summer, then-finance minister Tom Marshall issued a news release heralding a growth in population of a mere 171 people.
Thus far, not a peep on an estimated population drop of 264.
That could be because the growth in population – triggered as it was by the recession – could now turn once more in population decline as the western world comes out of a recession.
And while the current administration likes to claim credit for things they didn’t do – oil revenues and increased population for two examples – they seldom like to take responsibility for stuff they do.
Funny that, iddn’t it?
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From labradore, a series of posts commenting on perceptions of where the province’s population is the greatest.
“Population Observation” I, II, and III.
This pretty little picture is one of the type some people find a wee bit disturbing, apparently. It’s taken from the third post in the series that looks at the population decline on the Avalon peninsula.
Of rural areas, Labrador has had the “least bad” population decline, losing “only” eight percent of its 1986 population in the ensuing twenty years to 2007. The Northern Peninsula and the South Coast of Newfoundland had by then each lost nearly a third of the population they had in 1986.
The rural off-Avalon island as a whole has lost 23% of its 1986 population up to 2007 — a figure which is very comparable to the population loss in the Avalon Peninsula outside the St. John’s CMA during the same time period, 21%. Or, on other words, the rural Avalon has really done no worse, but no better, demographically speaking, than the rest of rural Newfoundland.
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