Echo generation holds key

Population: Province's future largely depends on keeping young people 20 to 25 from leaving: prof 

Published Wednesday April 27th, 2011
Jennifer Pritchett Telegraph-Journal (A1)
Daily Gleaner (A6)
And Canadaeast News Service

The echo generation - the offspring of the baby boomers - is a key factor behind solving New Brunswick's population woes, says a University of New Brunswick professor.

Michael Haan, who holds the university's Canada Research Chair in Population and Social Policy, said the youngest of the echo generation are now between the ages of 20 and 25 and New Brunswick's future largely hangs on whether enough of them stay in the province.
"The baby echo are at the age where people in the past have moved so a lot could be, and should be, done to retain them," he said in an interview Tuesday.

New Brunswick's challenging demographics is the topic of a presentation entitled Can New Brunswick's Population Bomb be Defused? It will be presented at 7 p.m. tonight at the Charlotte Street Art Centre.
"We have the echo," he said. "We have another generation of people. It's smaller (than the baby boomers), but it's still a significant population bulge so let's not lose them too."

Haan said the province's stagnant population problem can best be understood by looking back more than half a century when the number of residents in New Brunswick was still growing.

In 1956, he said, the province had the second-highest fertility rate in the country with a young population and it looked as if the growth trend would continue.

That didn't happen. Instead, baby boomers left the province in droves and
the birthrate plummeted over the ensuing decades.

"We lost a lot of the baby boomers - the people born in the 1950s and 1960s left," said Haan. "People left to go to urban areas. They left New Brunswick, which has cities but they are small cities, and they went to the big five or six census metropolitan areas probably because they expected there would be a lot more opportunity for them there."

Back then, New Brunswick women were also having more children than women in the rest of Canada - an average of 4.6 children, compared to 3.9 in the rest of the country.

These days, New Brunswick women are having less children than their counterparts in other areas of Canada. The fertility rate for New Brunswick is 1.5, compared to the national average of 1.8 for Canada.

"It's roughly a third and the implications for that are profound," said Haan, an assistant professor of sociology.

New Brunswick's population is stagnating in its growth and aging at the same time, a trend that has caused some serious concern about the health of the economy because of the decline in the number of young people. This had become such a concern that in 2006, then premier Shawn Graham created the Population Growth Secretariat to come up with ways to increase the number of residents of the province.

Before the Population Growth Secretariat was created, population in New Brunswick had fallen for 12 straight quarters. Thanks in part to New Brunswick's strategy to recruit immigrants and retain young people, that trend has begun to turn around.

About half of all Canadian provinces are battling population decline, but Haan argues that none - with the possible exception of Newfoundland - has struggled with it quite so dramatically as New Brunswick.

It's also interesting to note, he said, that the urbanization that occurred in the rest of Canada has largely passed New Brunswick by.

"New Brunswick has the urbanization rates of the rest of Canada in 1920," he said. "New Brunswick is approximately 50 per cent urban and 50 per cent rural. The rest of Canada is about 80 per cent urban and 20 per cent rural."

This scenario provides tremendous opportunity for New Brunswick to focus on its cities as areas of growth as the province's urbanization starts to catch up with the rest of the country.

Haan said it's crucial for New Brunswick to concentrate on making its cities attractive to young people to live.

His presentation tonight is part of the university's Ideas that Matter series, which is designed to engage people in topics that are meaningful to New Brunswickers.

© 2011 The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)