Some links: longevity, real estate, migrations, the future

I have been away on vacation in Venice--more on that later--but I am back now.

• Old age popped up as a topic in my feed. The Crux considered when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance? Information is Beautiful, meanwhile, shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Growing populations in cities, and real estate markets hostile even to established residents, are a concern of mine in Toronto. They are shared globally: The Malta Independent examined some months ago how strong growth in the labour supply and tourism, along with capital inflows, have driven up property prices in Malta. Marginal Revolution noted there are conflicts between NIMBYism, between opposing development in established neighbourhoods, and supporting open immigration policies.
• Ethnic migrations also appeared. The Cape Breton Post shared a fascinating report about the history of the Jewish community of industrial Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, while the Guardian of Charlottetown reports the reunification of a family of Syrian refugees on Prince Edward Island. In Eurasia, meanwhile, Window on Eurasia noted the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.
• Looking towards the future, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen was critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change. On a related theme, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok highlights a new paper aiming to predict the future, one that argues that the greatest economic gains will eventually accrue to the densest populations. Established high-income regions, it warns, could lose out if they keep out migrants.

Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have some links up for today, with an essay to come tomorrow.

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

On the ongoing depopulation of Cape Breton

The other day on my personal blog, I linked to a CBC News report describing how a Cape Breton store and bakery, desperate for workers, was offering free land to people who would move to that Nova Scotian island and work for them.

A family-run business is trying a unique approach to recruit people to live and work year-round in rural Cape Breton by offering two free acres of land to people who are willing to relocate.

Farmer's Daughter is a general store and bakery in Whycocomagh, N.S., which has a population of about 800. Sisters Sandee MacLean and Heather Coulombe took over the business earlier this year from their dairy farmer parents, who started it nearly 25 years ago.

MacLean told CBC News that the store has great employees — but it needs more of them to expand their operations.

"We have big ideas about what we'd like to do," she said.

The business would like to increase the number of year-round employees from 12 to at least 15, but hasn't gotten much response to traditional "help wanted" ads. Many young people have left the community to work in places like Halifax or Alberta.

This story has gotten quite a lot of attention nationally. I would be entirely justified, alas, in suspecting that any bump in migration will be as minor as that which occurred this February when the Cape Breton If Donald Trump Wins website briefly went viral. This humour website did get quite a lot of attention, and apparently did result in at least some inquiries. By this July, though, it seems as if the only migrants the website attracted were temporary ones, in the form of tourists.

A three-ringed binder, tucked into the corner of a small visitor information centre in Nova Scotia, may contain the proof of what many Cape Bretoners have suspected — that more Americans are descending on the island this year.

And locals say Donald Trump is the reason.

All day, tourists flow in and out of the one-room visitor information centre in the village of Baddeck, asking for advice on what to see and how to make the most of nearby attractions. A glance at a visitors' book — marked "Where are you from?" in block capital letters — reveals various American locations: Connecticut, Florida, New York City.

[. . .]

Room nights sold across the province rose by three per cent compared to the first half of 2015, but Cape Breton saw a boom of 16 per cent.

There was also a 12 per cent increase of visitors to Nova Scotia from the United States, while visitation from overseas declined seven per cent.

Although there are clearly many American tourists, it's harder to come by Americans who are actually following the website's advice and immigrating.

Back in January 2015, I looked into the phenomenon of out-migration from Atlantic Canada, the easternmost region of Canada and one that has consistently failed to share in the relative prosperity of other provinces. This out-migration does not occur at the same rate throughout. In the province of Nova Scotia, for instance, the capital city of Halifax has continued to experience some growth close to the Canadian average. At the other end is Cape Breton Island, a mountainous island in the northeast of the province famed as the last stronghold of Canadian Gaelic language and culture and as a land with a sadly dysfunctional industrial economy. Once, before the world wars, coal mining helped sustain a cosmopolitan industrial working class, living in the cities and towns which now constitute the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. But now, the mines are shut and nothing has replaced them. With no local economic motor and not nearly enough subsidies and income transfers coming from outside, the population of the entire island has been collapsing for decades, as the incipient natural decrease of the island's population is accelerated by emigration.

Nova Scotia's Finance and Treasury Board has noted the scale of this collapse. Rural Nova Scotia--Nova Scotia outside of Halifax, even--has been in steep decline for some time.



Cape Breton has done much worse than the average. Chris Shannon's widely shared 2014 Cape Breton Post article looks at the scale, and the inevitability, of this.

Fifteen-year-old Taylor O’Brien says the lure of more opportunities in the West has her thinking a move to Alberta is in her future after she completes Grade 9 at Bridgeport school in Glace Bay this June.

She says the plan is to move to Fox Creek, Alta., a town in the heart of that province’s oil industry. Her father lives there and O’Brien says she wants to move in July, in time to get settled and begin high school there in the fall.

“I really thought it through. I want to move,” she says.

“I’m too used to being stuck around here. It gets old after a while … seeing the same places. I see the Mayflower Mall like 10 times a week. I just want to explore.”

Sydney resident Thérèse Begg, 32, along with her spouse, intend to leave Cape Breton in the next couple of years for either Ontario or British Columbia.

It’s due to a lack of nightlife in the downtown and the small number of quality restaurants, she says.

Despite making a decent living as a baker and her partner being a machinist, Begg says it’s the lifestyle that’s driving them away from her hometown.

“There’s no variety of anything to do. Everybody goes to the hockey game, go to Tim Hortons, and they go to the movies. And that’s pretty much all there is to do,” says Begg, who grew up in Sydney but lived in Halifax for 10 years before returning in 2010.

The statistical trends in 2014 were grim. They have not changed at all.

CBRM’s economic development manager John Whalley says he’s more concerned about the rate of decline, which isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

“It’s actually accelerating,” he says.

“Cape Breton Island, in terms of rate, saw the biggest decline of any region in the country, according to this (Statistics Canada) data, and CBRM, obviously, constitutes a big part of that.”

In 2012-13, the figures show the CBRM lost 931 people to interprovincial migration to other parts of Canada, and a further 301 people moved to other areas of Nova Scotia (known as intraprovincial migration).

The other municipalities in Cape Breton are worse off with declines in population from the 2006 to 2011 census years at 4.6 per cent for Richmond County, 5.7 per cent for Inverness County, and 6.3 per cent for Victoria County.

Whalley says long-range projections from consulting firm Stantec estimate the CBRM’s population in 2031 would be approximately 78,000.

The island’s population is estimated to shrink to 102,000 from its current size of 134,535 people.

My Prince Edward Island, in marked contrast, is projected to experience relatively strong growth over that timeframe, having surpassed the declining population of Cape Breton just a few years ago.

All I can do is note this trend, rooted in the very deep-seated issues described. Cape Breton is beautiful--its natives agree, its visitors agree--but relatively few of these people actually want to live here. It's difficult to see how this could change, barring something completely unexpected and--frankly--unimaginable. At most, the ongoing slowdown in Alberta might slow down emigration, for a time. (Or, perhaps more plausibly, it might redirect it.)

On cat islands and the wider potential of rewilding

I'm still fond of a old post of mine that I had made back in January 2011, "What the cats of Houtong say about the population of Taiwan". That post, drawing on a September 2010 post I made at my blog, examined how the Taiwanese village of Houtong, located just outside the capital of Taipei, has managed to find new life after its coal mining economy went under thanks to its large feral cat community.

Visitors' raves on local blogs have helped draw cat lovers to fondle, frolic and photograph the 100 or so resident felines in Houtong, one of several industrial communities in decline since Taiwan's railroads electrified and oil grew as a power source.

Most towns have never recovered, but this tiny community of 200 is fast reinventing itself as a cat lover's paradise.

"It was more fun than I imagined," said 31-year-old administrative assistant Yu Li-hsin, who visited from Taipei. "The cats were clean and totally unafraid of people. I'll definitely return."

On a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of white, black, grey and calico-coloured cats wandered freely amid Houtong's craggy byways, while visitors captured the scene with cellphone cameras and tickled the creatures silly with feather-tipped sticks.

I went on to connect this with a variety of phenomena, including the decline of peripheral communities, the rise of international migration and tourism in Taiwan, even the demographic regime of the cats themselves. I had fun.

Last Saturday, I reported on another cat community, this one an entire island, in Japan. Early in March, The Atlantic featured a Reuters photo essay by Thomas Peter depicting the cats of the Japanese island of Aoshima. As one source describes it, Aoshima--located off of the coast of the major Japanese island of Shikoku--is an island with an aging human population and a rapidly growing cat population. This latter gives it some economic heft that it would otherwise ave lacked.

A remote island in southern Japan is home to 22 people and more than 120 cats.

Aoshima is a dwindling fishing community of elderly people who live mainly off retirement benefits. The cats were originally brought over to the island to deal with mice plaguing fishing boats. But they've since multiplied as there are no natural predators.

Tourists have been flocking to the island off Ehime prefecture on a ferry that runs twice twice a day. Cat lover Makiko Yamasaki, 27, said: "I came here looking to relax. And as for how is it? Well there is a ton of cats here, then there was this sort of cat witch, who came out to feed the cats, which was quite fun. So I'd want to come again."

Many more photos are available at the links, if you are curious.

The specific phenomenon of the "cat island" or "cat village" seems to be relatively common in East Asia. I have also read of the Pacific-coast cat island of Tashirohima received attention after being spared by the 2011 tsunami. What these communities, in Japan and Taiwan and perhaps elsewhere, all seem to share in common is a recent sharp decline in human populations, coupled with a growth of cat populations. It's reasonable to imagine that, in decaying human settlements, cats might do reasonably well, taking shelter in human constructions and feeding off of prey. The extent to which this is sustainable may be another question entirely. The cats of Aoshima, at least, seem to depend on regular feedings. Can they count on these indefinitely into the future, as Aoshima further depopulates? Will cat tourism bring in enough income to keep the whole cycle going? Will it lways do so?

This specific phenomenon fits within a broader context of rewilding, of the return of wild animals and ultimately wilderness to peripheral areas experiencing depopulation. One example of this is the return of wolves to East Germany in the past decades, aided in part by the depopulation of much of rural East Germany. Another example I'm personally familiar with is the gradual return of woodland to Prince Edward Island over the past century, as subsistence agriculture has disappeared and marginal lands fallen out of production.

It is estimated that in the early 1800s, forests would have covered some 95 per cent of this province; the average age of these trees would have been in the hundreds of years.

[. . .]

According to the State of the Island’s Forests report in 2002, only 9,000 hectares of this hardwood dominant shade tolerant forest remains in scattered patches throughout the island. By 1900, the population of PEI had drastically increased to 100,000 and only about 30% of the land was left in forests. During those 100 years, much of the best forested land went under the axe or was burned to make room for agriculture. Many species of mammals were extripated from the island forests, such as bears, fisher, marten, and piliated woodpeckers. Of those remaining forests, many had been disturbed by cuttings, fires, and cattle grazing. Another big problem was the introduction of diseases that has devastated the American Beech and American Elm on PEI as well as other areas.

[. . .]

According to the State of the Forest report in 2002, only 9,000 ha of forested area on PEI is in a late sussessional shade dominant forest state, typical of the Acadian Forest. That accounts for less than 2% of the entire island, that at one time, was entirely covered in trees. Since 1900, there was a gradual increase in forest coverage, mostly due to farm abandonment. Today, approximately 50% of the island’s land mass of 560,000 hectares is forested, but much of it is in poor condition, growing on poor worn-out agricultural fields. Much of the this has grown up into what’s termed old-field white spruce. This is an even aged stand of poor quality trees, growing on poor quality soils.

In the decline of the human population of many regions lies the potential for a managed return of wilderness. The Rewilding Europe website goes into great detail about the potential for rewilding projects around Europe. The Landscape Institute's James Richardson looked at eastern Portugal, suggesting that rural depopulation could be environmentally advantageous. (Perhaps also economically, if eco-tourism becomes popular?)

We arranged to meet with Pedro Prata, the lead advisor of the Western Iberia locality of Rewilding Europe in the Coa valley around 3 hours north of Idanha-a-Nova. Rewilding Europe is an organisation that aims to ‘rewild’ areas of Europe undergoing land abandonment. RE see it as an opportunity for the regeneration of land that has been misused for hundreds if not thousands of years and their ideas support many of our own. The Mediterranean climate and soils are actually ill-suited to the kind of agriculture practiced north of the Pyrenees and Alps.

Pedro showed us around their reserve which they have purchased from local landowners, and through planting native trees, grazing by native breeds of horse and cattle (in association with the Tauros Project), as well as reducing fire, are beginning to establish a regenerating ecosystem in the Coa valley. Although Rewilding Europe is mainly focused on nature conservation, its rewilding projects have important associated effects such as local employment in ecotourism, helping to balance the water table through vegetation as well as having a positive effect on game species such as partridge and rabbits which spill over from the reserve; hunting is a very important activity in Iberia.

We were able to learn many things from the visit including the vulnerability of traditional and sustainable cork-oak forests when too high a percentage of trees are harvested, removing their natural fireproofing. We learned that the area generally receives a good deal of water, but that this water falls seasonally and is often stored centrally and not distributed, or is lost to evaporation or surface run-off before it can be captured by the soil. We learned that despite appearances, the local areas do not provide the amenities such as reliable transport, education, employment and health care that would otherwise keep young people in the area.

A key thing that we have come to appreciate is that there are reasons that people have abandoned the land, and that we should not be trying to address the issue by forcing people, through our strategies, back into agriculture in inherently difficult areas. The abandonment will be used in our respective projects as an opportunity to encourage ecological regeneration, and the boost in productivity and economic activity that this can bring through a reconsideration of the value of nature and through outdoor pursuits.

The project prompts questions about areas of the UK that, were it not for subsidies, would also be undergoing abandonment, such as our sheep-grazed uplands and intensively managed grouse moors. In the UK, the positive effects of rewilding on these bleak areas would be easy to appreciate – native reforestation and the benefits to flood reduction, water quality, carbon storage, biodiversity, diverse and increased economic activity, recreational activity to name but a few.

Can we take, from the growth of the cat island phenomenon and the wider context of rewilding, clues as to how we should react to the future of rural depopulation? I am actually being serious when I say that we can and we should.

On looking at peripheries

For the next little while here at Demography Matters, I'll be posting examinations of various lengths about the demographic dynamics of peripheries, territories and populations both. Part of my reason for this has to do with my own personal interests in the topic, coming from a relatively marginal area of Canada myself. Relationships between peoples and individuals and regions located in the core and periphery and semi-periphery, to borrow the language of world-systems theory, have always interested me, especially as these relationships change.

More of my interest has to do with the ways in which this division of the world is starting to have real consequences for population change. As the distribution of human and economic capital changes, becoming scarce in some parts of the world and more abundant in others, with some being united by borders and others being cut off, real tensions do develop. This is especially so where things change unevenly. What areas are winners? What areas might catch up? What areas might end up declining?

Stay tuned.

On the outports of Newfoundland as a globally-relevant paradigm

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine wrote an essay about the outport communities of Newfoundland, an essay titled "On Futility". The outport is a form of community unique to Newfoundland, a densely-populated coastal village with a population in the dozens or hundreds dependent on the once-abundant cod fisheries. A 2008 article by Jenny Higgins for the Newfoundland Heritage site points out how low living standards and the attractiveness of other areas--urban Newfoundland, mainland Canada, maybe even points further--created a tradition of emigration that only intensified after the collapse of the same fisheries in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[The Newfoundland fisheries] existed for centuries and employed thousands of people, with many more engaged in processing, exporting and transporting the catch.

Then it got overfished. It collapsed in the early 90s, and it crashed hard: in some areas, stocks declined 99% over 50 years.

The fisheries have been under a moratorium for exactly 20 years now. There has been no improvement. Instead, the ecosystem is changing: invasive species are moving in, predators are devastating the remaining populations, and there is little to no evidence of a recovery. The Newfoundland fisheries are, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Large numbers of Newfoundlanders refuse to accept this. They demand that the fisheries be re-opened, as if the fish are merely hiding: the second a boat hits the water, the cod will come leaping out of the surf by the thousands, eager to be caught.

Others have accepted that the fisheries are dead, but insist that the jobs need to find them: they’re going to sit tight and wait for the government to find an industry for each and every teeny, tiny dot on the map. Even the towns with only a dozen residents. Even the towns accessible only by sea. Even the towns without reliable electricity or running water.

The hinky thing is that the young people seem to get it.

The exodus from the outports, and rural Newfoundland, is continuing to this day. There have been news reports of a very partial recovery of cod stocks last year, not nearly enough to justify the revival of the fisheries outports. A 2011 essay by sociologist Deatra Walsh--in Walsh's case, the town of Lewisporte--points out that many rural communities of Newfoundland may survive, service towns and the like, but that the outport is doomed. A 2001 paper (PDF) by Hamilton and Butler, "Outport Adaptations: Social Indicators through Newfoundland’s Cod Crisis", emphasizes that rural Newfoundland managed to retain a fair amount of social cohesion in the decade after the mortatorium in 1992, thanks to off-the-book employment and federal subsidies. In a 2012 opinion piece in the National Post, Newfoundland-born columnist Rex Murphy points out that the collapse of the outport has significant cultural repercussions for Newfoundlanders.

The end of the cod fishery stirred the greatest in-country migration of Newfoundlanders of modern times. Thousands of fishermen and plant workers and their families, scattered through all the towns and villages of Newfoundland’s meandering coastlines, were forced to look elsewhere for sustenance and employment. They were forced to abandon what they knew best, the environment of their families for generations, the peculiar set of skills that goes with fishing, and go out of province to an abruptly new life.

The moratorium brought on a seismic alteration in Newfoundland. The outports have been drained of their most active people; the long chain of continuous living from the sea and living on its very borders has been broken beyond repair. Many of the famous towns and outports — names that have been in songs and stories almost forever — are now whittled to half their size and less. Some old people remain. The younger come back every little while to visit, see parents, or just to savor time close to the water. But the dynamic life of the majority of outports is over with the fishery that gave birth to it.

It’s a striking, very melancholy change. While the outports dwindle into mere picturesqueness, the capital city of St. John’s explodes with activity and commerce from the offshore. There’s a Calgary feel to how fast things are moving in St. John’s. The offshore oil developments came at a very providential time. They also, I think, take the mind away from the stark prospects of Newfoundland outside the city.

[. . .]

Those who have left for good know how deep the change was. Those who remain carry the largely unspoken insight that outport Newfoundland, which gave birth to such a singular culture, rich in humour and pathos, indented with hardship and tragedy, and irresistible to those who felt its appeal, is on the point of vanishing.

All this is true. And yet, I'd suggest that the movement away from the outports towards urban areas--places like the capital city of St. John's, or like any number of destinations in Canada like the big cities of Ontario or Alberta--is a good thing for the people who lived there, or who would have lived there. Isolated one-industry villages capable of providing only marginal standards of living aren't good places to live. I'd question, like Wonkman, if it's a good idea to spend resources keeping non-viable communities alive at an artificial level of activity, as opposed to allowing for a certain amount of planned decline. Certainly the young people of the outports don't seem interested in staying in communities which have outlasted their economic base.

Three Atlantic Canadian articles

Population increase (or decrease) is entirely determined by a combination of natural increase (or decrease) and either minus or plus migration. In Atlantic Canada, the trends are definitely pointing towards a decrease.

In the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson writes ("Newfoundlanders return, but the outports are still in peril") about how in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, an oil-driven economic boom and remittances haven't reversed a tendency towards population decrease, especially in the outports--isolated mid-sized fishing communities--scattered liberally on the coastline outside of the Avalon Peninsula area that includes the capital.

At least rhetorically, Newfoundland governments have always been for keeping the rural part of the province alive and thriving. And there have been some spotty successes.

Some of that money earned from Alberta has returned to outports to rebuild or spruce up homes. People from “away” have found these communities delightful and purchased second homes there. Sometimes, although not often, Newfoundlanders have returned to the outports to retire, although most of them prefer to be nearer large medical complexes. And, of course, tourism has shown sprightly growth in recent years, giving an economic boost to some places.

The overall numbers, however, do not lie. Half the population now lives in the Avalon peninsula, home to thriving St. John's. The strong economy in and around the provincial capital explains why the recession has struck Newfoundland somewhat less heavily than other parts of Canada. The housing market in and around St. John's is among the hottest in Canada. In a province with an 18-per-cent unemployment rate, it's often hard to find skilled workers to build or renovate houses, some of that labour having gone to Western Canada.

A double migration has hit rural Newfoundland: to St. John's and to other parts of Canada.

Meanwhile, the attempts by Prince Edward Island to attract permanent immigrants that I blogged about earlier seem, according to the CBC ("Majority of immigrants to P.E.I. leave: report"), to be pretty futile. Bad management of the programs involved don't help.

The Provincial Nominee Program has been a revolving door for the majority of immigrant families who participate, according to a report released Wednesday by the University of Prince Edward Island.

The program, commonly known as PNP, matched foreign investors who wanted to immigrate to Canada with P.E.I. companies they could invest in. In return for their investment, applicants would have their immigration application expedited.

The study, conducted with help from the P.E.I. Association for Newcomers, looked at 44 immigrant families who arrived in the province through the PNP in the last four months of 2006.

When the report's authors checked back 2½ years later, they found all but 11 of the families had left a retention rate of 25 per cent.

Shine-Ji Youn Chung, a co-author of the study and an international student at UPEI, said she understands the frustration felt by many immigrants who came to the province through the PNP.

"They're feeling like, 'Okay, I am not part of this community, we are not welcome, even though we are here.'

Finally, MacLean's blogger and journalist Aaron Wherry reports on how a Conservative member of the Canadian parliament was backtracking on his condemnation of unemployed Nova Scotians for their refusal to do farm work.

Gerald Keddy, yesterday. If anyone ever stops Nova Scotia farmers from hiring migrant labourers to harvest their crops, they would destroy a lot of businesses because unemployed Nova Scotians don’t want those jobs, says Gerald Keddy, the Conservative MP for South Shore-St. Margarets. ”Nova Scotians won’t do it — all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can’t get work,” Mr. Keddy said Monday.

Gerald Keddy, today. Conservative MP Gerald Keddy is apologizing for referring to some unemployed Haligonians as “no-good bastards.” Keddy, MP for the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore-St. Margaret’s, issued a statement Tuesday saying he was sorry for the “insensitive comments.” ”In no way did I mean to offend those who have lost their job due to the global recession, nor did I mean to suggest that anyone who is unemployed is not actively looking for employment,” he said.

In truth, farm work is one of those 3-D jobs--dirty, difficult, and dangerous--that has always attracted relatively badly off people, especi8ally migrants who aren't included in the social contract. Just because a region has high overall unemployment, as commenters note, doesn't mean that uts labour market wouldn't be segmented.

A note on one Canadian periphery

My birthplace, the Canadian province of Rrince Edward Island, population 140 thousand, isn't often considered in relation to wider demographic trends. While it's true that the Island is peripheral even in the Canadian context, with its population of 140 thousand being smaller than those of a dozen Canadian cities and an economy based primarily on the service sector (including tourism) and slowly declining primary industries like agriculture and fishing, it's also true that Prince Edward Island's demographic prospects and futures prefigure the demographic issues facing peripheral areas throughout the First World. Scott Peterson wrote last week about how falling populations is reshaping the landscape of many depopulating parts of Europe; Prince Edward Island has faced this trend for more than a century. Although there is now intense human presence on the landscape of Prince Edward Island, with more than half of the Island's land being used for agricultural or other purposes, in the late 19th century an evenly distributed population of farmers occupied the near-totality of the Island's territory. This geographic distribution of population changed when, soon after Canadian confederation, Islanders began to participate in the ongoing mass emigration from Atlantic Canada.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the exodus was primarily to the ‘Boston states.’ It reached crisis proportions in the 1880s when our industrial boom began to go bust. Despite efforts to staunch the outward flow, it continued unabated until the United States closed the border during the 1930s Depression. Scholars estimate that between 1851 and 1931 some 600,000 people left the Maritimes, nearly 50 percent of the population still present in 1931. Following the Second World War, out-migration again became acute as villages dependent on farming, fishing, forestry, and mining expelled their people to the booming Ontario economy. The oil crisis of the 1970s shifted the emphasis to jobs in Alberta.

[. . .]

Scholars debate the impact of out-migration asking whether it was a cause or a result of the region’s poor economic showing. It was undoubtedly both. Living on the edge of two cradles of industrialization in the nineteenth century – New England and the St Lawrence-Great Lakes heartland – it was difficult to establish a third node of development on the Atlantic coast. People were inevitably attracted to the new growth centres. With dwindling numbers, provincial grants declined as did political clout in Ottawa. Economic growth thus became even more difficult to sustain against the centralizing tendencies of Canada’s National Policy. Head offices of banks and businesses followed the money and people were obliged to do likewise. It is unclear whether these trends can ever be reversed.

As a province with a relatively more agricultural economy than its neighbours, Prince Edward Island experienced relatively higher out-migration, with outright population decline being the main trend for most of the first half of the 20th century and many territories which once were farmed being allowed to return to nature. Out-migration slowed down over the second half of the 20th century, as federal transfer payments began to subsidize seasonal economies, the standard of public services improved sharply, and the tourism sector began to take off. The net resutl of all this is that Prince Edward Island faces less potentially damaging demographic challenges than any of the other three Atlantic Canadian provinces. For instance, the Island's fertility and birth rates are higher than in most other Canadian provinces, while the province actually benefits from interprovincial migration: more Canadians move to Prince Edward Island than leave. The tourism sector plays a major role in this second trend; tourism campaigns have successfully promoted an image of Prince Edward Island as a pleasant territory with beautiful natural scenery and an engaging, friendly population, this industry attracting migrants and helping to boost levels of employment. If Prince Edward Island's economy didn't make spectacular leaps forward, this economic strategy may well have helped the province avoid the massive out-migration that has dominated Newfoundland and Labrador's demographic trends for decades. It's worth noting that this strategy isn't dissimilar from Spain's recent economic and population growth, driven so heavily by (among other migratory trends) the movement of northern Europeans to the Costa del Sol and other tourist destinations.

All of this isn't to say that Prince Edward Island doesn't face serious demographic issues. The definitely sub-replacement fertility rate, among other factors, ensures that the number of students (and future workers) in Prince Edward Island may fall by one-fifth by 2020, and Prince Edward Island's development minister has warned that the aging of Island's population and the province's development into a "retirement province" risks creating serious labour shortages, especially if immigrant retention rates don't rise. Even now, as Zena Olijnik ("Immigration: Give us your skilled") wrote recently in Canadian Business, flawed guest worker programs and local populations unwilling to undertake dirty and dangerous jobs are threatening the viability of some industries, leaving some people in these same outlying areas to propose economic revitalization strategies like wildly uneconomic ferry routes. The only thing that can be said about these issues is that the Island has managed to buy itself some time in which to adapt to its new demographic environment. Here's to hoping that this time will be well-spent.