Population Growth Is Not An End In Itself
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
By now, you have likely heard that New Brunswick had a pretty good Census.
Between 2016 and 2021, we added 28,500 people to the province. That’s a growth rate of 3.8 percent.
This is good but, in my estimation, we will need to bump that up to around 6.5 percent per census period through 2041 to hit the population goal of 1 million New Brunswickers.
We will also need good planning by the regions within the province to determine the workforce demand in different areas. Moncton and Fredericton are on a sustainable growth path. Most other areas? Not so much.
What is sustainable, then? Enough population growth to meet workforce demand, replacement demand, and growth demand. We are now retiring at twice the annual rate compared to a few years ago and we have several industries that are in strong growth mode.
In an upcoming Huddle “Insights” podcast, Propel CEO Kathryn Lockhart tells Don Mills and I that this is the biggest threat to the growth of the province’s tech industries; firms are really starting to struggle to find IT workers.
This is the ultimate point. Population growth is not an end in itself.
If the number of residents increased to one million but 90 percent of them were retirees from the rest of Canada, that would have only exacerbated New Brunswick’s economic and demographic challenges.
Not that I have a problem with people retiring here. I plan on retiring here. What was the view outside your window this morning?
But we need workers and lots of them—probably something like 200,000 or more by 2041—for replacement and growth.
A million or more New Brunswickers by 2040, with a good distribution around the province, will ensure sustainability for the next generation and beyond.
That’s the end goal.
We need a government that can sustainably fund public services; communities that have enough workers to ensure they can offer a wide variety of services that are attractive to residents; export industries that are not constrained by a lack of workers; entrepreneurial opportunities that are filled.
It was a good week for New Brunswick. Let’s put the pedal to the metal.
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