Baby Talk
The train is still headed straight for the cliff.
In 2024, Newfoundland and Labrador is on track to see fewer than 3,000 babies born locally for the year. If we don’t fall below 3,000 this year, it will be 2025.
Only 30 years ago, we were seeing more than 6,000 babies born in the province each year but in the 2020s, we’ve been seeing typically that many deaths.
The chart below shows the number of births in Newfoundland and Labrador each year from 1991 to 2023. Steady downward trend the whole time. Minor uptick between 2008 and 2010. That’s 100% the recession during which lots of people from Newfoundland and Labrador flocked home to hide out until the storm passed. In 2011, the downward trend in live births resumed despite Hebron booming and Muskrat Falls going flat-out.
There’s another uptick in 2021 but that is 100% an echo of locking people in their houses for two and a half months during COVID in early 2020. There’s a dramatic drop in the past couple of years but really that just is the old pre-COVID trend picking up again.
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The provincial government’s estimate of population looks rosy. About 538,000 last year. Maybe 545,000 or so this year.
But look closely at the numbers. There’s a modest net gain in people moving in and people moving out, whether it’s involving moves from other provinces or other countries but the population is still well below what it was 30 years ago. We are not really growing at such an incredible rate annually anyway and we really need way more people than we have.
The dependency ratios tell you something truly dramatic though. That’s the share of the population under 15 years of age and over age 65 compared to the folks in the middle. They are the labour force. They are in their productive years, generating the taxes that pay for the other two age groups who are dependent on them, one way or another. Hence the name dependency ratio.
In the Eastern Urban Zone - Sin Jawns basically - in 2023, we had one person in the middle and one person in the dependent portion. That’s roughly a 50:50 ratio Labrador was roughly the same as Sin Jawns. Across the rest of the island, though, 70% of the population was in the dependent age groups and most of those were over 65 years of age, not kids. If you don’t know why, go back and look at the chart of births.
A mainland think-tank called Public Policy Forum will tell you that there’s a storm of economic success across Atlantic Canada. Their latest update on the region - issued September 30 - gushes about the economic miracle. “From 2010 to 2019, Atlantic Canada’s population grew by just 77,797. From 2019 to 2023, it grew by 169,156, with a growth rate of 2.5 percent in 2022 and 3.1 percent in 2023. The streetscapes in sleepy, previously homogenous communities of Atlantic Canada were suddenly more diverse and lively, with Punjabi, Mandarin and Tagalog voices where previously only English or French were heard. In Charlottetown, for example, there is now a 16-team Filipino basketball league. Many of the newcomers came from outside Canada — 28,000 immigrants in 2021-2022 and 32,000 immigrants in 2022-2023; in other words 60,000 over two years. Halifax alone had almost 30,000 immigrants arrive from 2020 to 2023.”
But as much as PPF makes everything sound amazingly positive - to be frank the Filipino thing and the “more diverse and lively” bit is a wee bit cringy/hick/racist - there are real problems they cannot ignore:
The massive surge of people will take some time to process. The overall momentum picture is still positive, but in-migration has slowed, investment remains low and there are difficult underlying challenges for slow-growth regions.
There’s a great quote in the report from economist Doug May, a strong supporter of these e-scribbles.
The convergence of … Atlantic Canada and the rest of Canada is incredible, and the most incredible thing is, because of oil, Newfoundland goes from last place to being above — by 2013-14 — the Canadian average,” says Doug May, an economist at Memorial University. “When you look at adjusted income, it’s highly likely that the standard of living on an individual basis is perhaps higher in Atlantic Canada than it is in the Canadian average.”
Doug is right but all that happened a decade ago. In the meantime, lots of old trends, like the declining birthrate have just carried on. Plus, everyone needs to remember that economic miracle was driven not by sustainable private sector investment but unsustainable government spending based on oil. We don’t have a truly thriving oil and gas sector.
That unsustainable government spending has continued apace despite massive drops in oil revenue. The government just borrows heavily to fill in the hole, which does nothing but add another enormous pile of debt on top of the other massive debt piles to the point where just paying the interest on debt is the second largest government expense each year. It’s so bad the finance department now spends more time fiddling with the books to hide stuff - like cash for prisons that it just spends on something else - rather than do anything productive with the money.
The other consequence of what’s been going on is that health care now consumes half of the money the government brings in and the impact of that declining birthrate is that education spending will drop off as well. The flurry of new schools built on the northeast Avalon will not be matched by schools anywhere else and, truthfully, we may soon seen an end to new schools anywhere in the province. That money will just get redirected
The bigger fall-out from the ageing population we have is that across three of the four regions of the island. Anywhere outside St. John’s, in other words. The aged population and the lack of a well-educated workforce makes the regions less attractive for sustainable long-term development and much more vulnerable to the cash tossed around by windy carpetbaggers chasing after massive government subsidies. These aren’t sustainable and like the hydrogen hype get intense support from desperate people locally and in political offices. At the same time, the government just won;t get out of the way and let traditional sustainable industries like the fishery transform to modern businesses.
If you go back to the chart showing the number of births each year, you will notice how steep the drop is at the front end. There was a downward trend before that but things picked up speed with the cod moratorium in 1992 and the loss of about 70,000 people mostly from rural Newfoundland and all with at least one child in tow and others on the way. Things flatten out a bit after that and then in 2015 - after Muskrat and Hebron were done - things drop off steeply again. If you look at the numbers behind the lines you’ll the see the drop from 4,000 to less than 3,000 has taken way less time than it took to get from 6,000 to 5,000.
None of this is a surprise. People inside the provincial government had a very good handle on all of this and that’s why the Strategic Economic Plan and the original Strategic Social Plan from the early to mid-1990s included the population changes in the plans for economic growth and in the changes to health care, education and so on. It included not just how many people and how old they’d be but where they’d likely be living. All that went out the window in 2003 and the Liberals just killed off the last of the 1992 plan’s most successful programs. They ditched accountable spending for the sort of bottomless bit of give-away cash that failed in Newfoundland and Labrador through the 1980s, failed again after 2003, and that proved equally useless in Saskatchewan as well.
These 1990s efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador were genuine strategic plans that looked at fundamental trends over a long time. These days everyone calls themself a strategist and they all produce strategies even if 90% of them are just lists of things to do. They produce words with no targets or timelines or indicators of success. Politically, the ideas that lay at the heart of those real strategic plans disappeared as politicians found it easier to ignore what was coming and just plan for the next election. Bags of easy oil money just reinforced the spending spree and since now everyone is hooked on the drug, the politicians that replaced the Williams-era addicts just keep feeding the addiction. This could be called kicking the can down the road but really it was walking into the tunnel and pretending the noise and the lights weren’t the oncoming freight train barreling at you full speed.
Speaking of can kicking, there’s a story that then-Premier Brian Tobin called up Chris Flanagan when he was an editor at the Telegram and tore strips off him over a series the Telegram ran on the impact demographic changes would have on the province. All crap, Tobin said or words to that effect. The story screwed up Tobin’s claim that we were all rolling in money instead of manure as Brian lined up to go back to Ottawa. The folks in the newsroom loved it and if the stories are true about a recording of Tobin in full flight, these days it would be worth cash to spread it around. You’d have not only the humour of the moment but also the wry satisfaction of understanding how monumentally wrong Tobin and all those who came after him were.
Tobin’s wasn’t the only government to wonder what the rumbling was. One of the reasons Danny Williams and his crowd were the most incompetent administrations ever in Newfoundland and Labrador was that they had the benefit of so much knowledge and ignored all of it as they overpsent and went after Muskrat Falls based on absolutely no thought at all, save their own egotistical self-stroking. And the crowd that’s been running the place for the past decade are no better. They had a chance to shift things but chose instead to make everything worse, across the board just to save their own hides. At the rate things are going, we will have speed cameras across the but no one driving fast enough to trigger them unless it is on an electric scooter or in an electric wheelchair.
Things aren’t hopeless. There’s no inevitable collapse. We are only in the state we are in because the people leading our province didn’t want to change course even if it would be in everyone’s best interest. There are lots of things we can do to get out of the hole and become as prosperous as everywhere else. There are stacks of reports dating back decades that show the simple things that we could do to stimulate the economy, draw more people here, and go from a place the size of Hamilton Ontario to one where, like Saskatchewan and Alberta, people are clamouring to get in.
Public Policy Forum is right about one thing: Atlantic Canada is not ready for what is already happening to us. Some are better off, further ahead than others but - as we showed this week - in Newfoundland and Labrador even something as basic as fixing the bureaucratic clag that chokes off new business and with it more people and more money for everyone just turns into a suffocating cloud of brain farts.
Nothing changes.
Just more brain farts.
Or just farts.
“The sea is in our blood here in Newfoundland and Labrador.”
That’s what someone wrote for Andrew Furey to tell people at a one-day conference and trade show for the provincial aquaculture association. Furey was filling in for Gerry Byrne, the fisheries minister, who was off to Ottawa for some reason.
Furey didn’t have anything better to tell the people in an important but troubled part of our provincial economy that operates in those parts of Newfoundland that are the most hit by the ageing, shrinking, not well educated population. There’s a huge problem with finding skilled workers, for one, so people like one former Danny minister are so desperately trying to find people they are now branching out into central Asia. They’re stanning for people so they are in the Five Stans to see if they can scrounge up a few warm bodies.
Furey had nothing new to say on policy - no mercy flights of Palestinians to join the Ukrainians, apparently - so he went with the sort of baby talk that had people rolling their eyes into their skulls when Furey’s uncle was traveling up and down the Great Northern Peninsula as a newly elected member of the House of Assembly 40 years ago.
That’s the pathetic state of our province. Recycling recycled copies.
We can do better.
We must do better.
