Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
I don't want to be like "everything is fine " because clearly these are big problems. But it does feel as if the Herald (and regional CBC) overstate the negative, or leave readers with the impression that Nova Scotia is faring terribly in all ways.
There are a lot of people who believe that, for example, Halifax has high unemployment, or that Nova Scotia'a debt is worse than every other province, or whatever. That's because these things are never contextualized properly and a lot of reporting is driven by assumption, not fact. For example, CBC a few months ago ran a story saying Halifax had a shrinking population. This was based on the reporter misstating that the population GROWTH rate was shrinking. So that became a headline "Halifax population declines." In the context of an outrageously pessimistic civic climate, no one questioned such a self-evidently incorrect headline.
I'd also add that 2015 is shaping up to be the opposite, the strongest year for population growth in more than a decade. No reporting on that though.
The relentless bad-news drumbeat goes beyond making us aware of problems, and dives straight into fatalism. I think it makes people feel terrible, rather than fired up to address problems. I think it leads at least some prople to leave, out of an assumption that there's "no future" here, rather than due to any personal hardship.
And they really can't go a day without using the phrase "outmigration". The funny thing is, MS outmigrstion is not proportionally much higher than most provinces, but it isn't offset by sufficient in-migration and immigration.
So yeah, we have a lot of issues, but this fixation on our poor demographics, etc, is maybe excessive. We need some sunlight with the gloom. It's like climate change: environmentalists are starting to talk more about solutions and the economic snd technological possibilities of fixing the situation, rather than just thumping people over the head with apocalyptic scenarios call the time. Because that just made people feel hopeless and ready to give up.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
For 2014-2015, Statistics Canada has Halifax pegged at 1.4% growth. That is pretty much ideal for a city; much beyond that and it gets hard to grow infrastructure fast enough. The unemployment rate is 5.9%, one of the lowest in Canada (Calgary has crept up to 6.7% due to the downturn there) and there has been job and income growth. Basically Halifax is, economically, one of the healthiest cities in Canada by any important and objective measure.
Often the provincial statistics are misunderstood as well. For example, NS population has been basically stagnant for a few years, but this aggregate statistic masks the more nuanced shift that is taking place. The urban part of the province is growing, rural areas with good access to the city (e.g. Kings and Hants) are growing or staying about the same, and far-flung rural areas with poor services are rapidly declining.
Many of the conclusions that people reach by looking at provincial statistics are, I think, dead wrong. People think that the city is growing only because of migrants from rural areas and that that will stop when the rural areas become depopulated. Wrong. People think that you can project the current provincial trends forward in time based on the aggregate totals. Also wrong. The declining, poorer areas represent a smaller and smaller percentage of the province as the years go by. As a result they will eventually have less impact on the provincial growth rate. Population loss in those areas also isn't necessarily bad since these are the places with the weakest economies that are the most expensive to provide services to. Often economic growth comes from getting people to live in areas that are more economically efficient, and that's what's happening in NS.
So a lot of the griping is just wrong. But I do think that the other point you alluded to is more important because it renders the fact-checking largely moot; even if the doom and gloom were 100% justified, it would still not be a useful solution.
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While you two are among my favorite posters here, and balance is always important, I think your takes on Nova Scotia's actual challenges seem to me decidedly complacent.
I actually think Drybrain's analogy surrounding climate change as an apt comparison. When did Al Gore first start lecturing on the climate change threat in the form of "inconvenient truth", which he would turn into a movie? I think it was around 2003 or 2004. We're now literally over a decade later, a few blockbuster "disaster" movies and a highly success Gore documentary, a Nobel prize for climate science, near unanimous consensus in the scientific community of the threat, and some of the world's most powerful leaders on board. And what have we done? Really nothing concrete. It's true that maybe we're finally getting down to brass tacks. But it took 10 years of brow beating and threats and apocalyptic predictions to get here, where we're finally acting.
Change is difficult enough in Nova Scotia, but the change we need to make to address these challenges *will* require some comparable significant brow-beating to fix, and we're nowhere where we need to be.
Again, I agree that Halifax seems to be doing fine, but Nova Scotia, overall, is not. And we're still not even half of NS' population. If Nova Scotia spirals off a demographic cliff, with a incredibly shrinking tax base due to an incredibly shrinking working age population coupled with a radically growing senior population, Halifax cannot save it. It'll be dragged right along with it. And Halifax, too, isn't getting younger. While not as significantly impacted by demographic challenges as most other parts of the province, we're are not isolated from them.
It's gotten quite trendy to yawn about the Ivany Report, but it's urgency was as accurate today, as it was when it was first tabled.
* 100,000 fewer working age people by 2036, a 20% decline.
* projected 41% increase in 65+ aged population from 2009-2034
* projected 30% decrease in 0-20 year population from 2009-2034
* projected 21% decrease in 20-64 year population from 2009-2034
* Seniors will constitute almost 30% of our population by 2035
* the average taxpayer aged 65 and older contributes 46 per cent less income tax revenue than works aged 45 to 54 years.
And today, before any of these changes take place, health care already eats up $4.5 billion of the province's $9.5 billion annual budget
What else?
* Worst Real GDP growth 1990-2009 by percent among all provinces
* Ludicrous labour force participation. 63.4% in 2013, second lowest in Canada, with 290,000 jobless and not trying to find a job.
* Lagging levels of urbanization compared to ROC; while urbanization has accelerated in the rest of Canada since the 1920s, it's been flat in Nova Scotia essentially since 1951, right up until 2011. We may perceive that to be incrementally changing, I'm not sure it is, and stupid federal/provincial policies will continue to sustain unrealistic rural service provision, sinking ferries, dying 19th century industrial plants and mills, and will thus continue to deter urbanization over the long term, increasing costs and reducing the dynamism of cities like Halifax.
* radical youth unemployment, at 18.3% in 2014, the very highest in Canada. This is also terrible in Halifax. From 2002-2012, only 3% of new jobs went to workers under the age of 45.
* Still lagging on immigration. We are doing better, but we've never received more than 3000 immigrants in any given year in the last 15 years. Even if we doubled our usual immigration numbers to 4000, only received working age immigrants, and sustained that amount of in-migrant settlement for 20 years, we'd still not have enough to cover the projected loss of 100,000 working age population by the same time.
At some point, it becomes a matter of basic math, and the in 20 years, nothing will add up anymore.
I don't at all blame the Chronicle Herald for sounding the alarm. Anything less would be irresponsible. Sometimes balance simply won't do.
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