Posted Mar 26, 2015, 6:32 PM
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ハルウララ
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Toronto
Posts: 12,853
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle23554298/
Quote:
How the Maritimes became Canada’s incredible shrinking region
The cause of that storm is no mystery; governments have been grappling with it for years. “Everyone knows what the problem is,” says Peter McKenna, head of political science at UPEI. “It’s just that no one knows what to do about it.”
Because of their fading economies, PEI, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are running out of people like Mireyne MacMillan. Last year, 1,000 more people left PEI for other parts of Canada than arrived from them. The population of Nova Scotia has been falling since 2011, when it peaked at 948,000; over the next two decades, another 20,000 people are expected to leave. New Brunswick is in similar straits. Between the middle of 2012 and the middle of last year, the population dropped by almost 2,000, to 754,524.
But the real problem is the makeup of the population that remains. Every year – due to a weakening economy, a dearth of immigrants, and a population reluctant to face these problems – there are fewer workers to pay taxes and more old people in need of government services.
Within five years, a provincial study predicts, the working-age population of New Brunswick will have declined by 30,000, again largely due to the exodus of younger workers, even as 50,000 more people pass the age of 65. A provincial commission in Nova Scotia forecasts that, within 20 years, that province’s working-age population will have declined by 100,000, or about 20 per cent.
The trend may seem familiar – “going down the road” to find work is a Maritime tradition – but the tipping point is approaching rapidly, says Marco Navarro-Génie, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a conservative think tank located in Halifax. “We have an economic crisis on the horizon,” he says.
Who will pay for the health care of a population with so many seniors and so few workers? Who will purchase the houses going up for sale? Who will buy the new cars, the appliances, the children’s clothing – all the things that families need when starting out? How far will children have to be bused to the few remaining schools?
Such a future can have only one outcome: slashed health care, education and other social services; ever greater departures by anyone able to escape the vortex; rural towns that become ghost towns; growing provincial deficits and debts, along with steadily reduced credit ratings that will increase borrowing costs.
Disaster looms unless Maritimers work together to reverse the slide – and, in some respects, adjust their thinking.
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