Is More Growth Always Good?
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax.
About a decade ago, leaders in the Maritimes looked at the flight of young people from the region, our aging residents, and our shrinking population and realized they needed to do something.
So they re-imagined our immigration strategy and started working to entice more outsiders into the region. They’re plan worked — really well. Since about 2015, the region’s population trends have reversed dramatically. Our population growth now outpaces the national average.
Our leaders brag about this all the time.
Head to any state of the province address or economic update and you can guarantee they’ll flash a graph of that hockey-stick line representing recent population growth.
They’ll talk gleefully about our record-smashing immigration numbers and how they’re going to ratchet up the pace even more in the future.
As far as I can tell, the underlying assumption here is that growth is unquestionably good and that we should grow as much as we can, as fast as we can. It doesn’t even seem like our leaders treat this as an assumption. It’s more like an immutable law of the universe: “e” will always equal mc2, and more growth is always best.
But is it?
There are plenty of very convincing arguments for more immigration.
Maritimers are, on average, among the oldest people in the country; we’re dying faster than we’re being born. If we want to survive as a region, we must bring people in from outside. We also face severe labour shortages in almost every sector. The only realistic way to fill those jobs is with people who don’t yet live here.
Even beyond the economics, our communities are stronger, more vibrant, and, frankly, way more interesting when we welcome a wide spectrum of people.
At Huddle, we write all the time about the cool way newcomers are enriching our communities. Look at the impact Tareq Hadhad and Peace By Chocolate have made in a few short years. But people like Mary Nkrumah, Patrick Giguère, and Mary Grace Firmeza, are all helping build beautiful communities here.
(As a Nova Scotian who years ago pestered his Ontario-born wife into moving back east, I can say unequivocally that even those “snobby” Upper Canadians make our region better).
But what toll is all this growth taking on our region?
Our public services are strained beyond the breaking point. There are 129,321 people in Nova Scotia waiting for a family doctor. Maybe we should ensure they’ve got one before luring in thousands more Toronto urbanites.
While we’re at it, why don’t we make sure people aren’t getting priced out of their homes, or sleeping in tents? Halifax grew by 9,262 people last year and only 2,950 new homes came onto the market. In what world is that sustainable?
Our leaders continue to set ambitious immigration targets, apparently based on their unwavering belief that more people is always better, no matter what.
We’re funneling time and resources into attracting skilled immigrants and boosting inter-provincial migration without, it seems, any real, long-term plan for what to do when they all get here.
Growth is good, and we should almost certainly keep bringing more people into the Maritimes. But we must spend more time thinking – really thinking – about what it means to live in such a rapidly growing region.
From my vantage point, it doesn’t seem like our leaders are doing that. I worry about the consequences. I think we’re already seeing the strain.
We have a troubling history in this part of the world of turning a suspicious eye to “come from aways.” (I know a lot of transplants who’d use much less diplomatic language).
But making it harder for people to live here, shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, is not the answer. That’s certainly not the argument I’m trying to make.
I just worry that, ten or 15 years from now, we’ll look back at this period of hyper growth and wonder why we weren’t more thoughtful about our policies.
We owe it to ourselves, and to all the new arrivals who will hopefully call the region home in the coming decades, to do that work.