To stay or to go

Published Thursday April 28th, 2011 C6

It's sad to see a village, once robust, fall into obscurity.

Industries close, no one's moving in, and in fact, people are leaving.

There's no real future for the kids, so they leave for the city. They visit, but they'll never live there again.

And so it goes - the village gets smaller, the school, the bank and the post office close up, and one day, you look around and the only things left are a few old houses, the church and the convenience store.

While that story is common to a hundred villages in New Brunswick, it's also reflective of New Brunswick itself on a larger scale.

We are a province battling population loss, low immigration rates, a low birth rate and limited opportunity. It's not a good scenario at all.

University of New Brunswick assistant professor Michael Haan presented a talk on Wednesday called Can New Brunswick's Population Bomb be Defused? He's concerned for our future.

It wasn't always like this. Fifty-five years ago we had the second-highest fertility rate in Canada. But a lot happened, virtually all at the same time, to put a kink in our expanding population.

The 1950s meant opportunity, and many New Brunswickers went looking for it in southern Ontario. They still do, in central and western Canada and overseas.

As well, the automobile had become an affordable, dependable means of getting people to other places. It was easy to move to a new place.

And just as all that was happening, along came a reliable means of contraception - the birth control pill.

It proved to be extremely popular, and our birth rate tumbled. Why have six kids when you only wanted three? Or why have any at all, given the choice?

Our N.B. birth rate went from 4.6 children per woman to 1.5 in a half-century.

Choice, transportation and opportunity doomed us, and they continue to keep our population low.

So how do we reverse the trend?

We have the Population Growth Secretariat, which has seen modest success, and we encourage its continuation.

Can we encourage families to have more babies? We can with money. A cheque for, say, $5,000 on the birth of your third child just might do it.

New Brunswick, as an officially bilingual province, has meant economic growth and job opportunities in some areas. But this remains a delicate balancing act between living up to our bilingual nature and not driving away unilingual New Brunswickers who cannot master a second language. They move elsewhere for jobs.

We have a great need for more economic opportunities. The main reason people are leaving our northern communities is that there are no jobs - no good jobs. It will take a massive re-engineering of our economic base, with less dependency on natural resources and more focus on finished goods from those resources and a knowledge-based economy.

And finally, we need more immigrants - families with young children who, once here and working, settle in and consider this their home.

That would require more opportunity, more outreach, more programs and fewer restrictions to make their transition smooth. Once we have all that, and have immigrants staying here, more will follow, just as they do in larger centres.

Population growth isn't impossible. There's lots we can do. We just have to decide to do it.