Statistics Canada came out with some new numbers the other day. And, boy, do they make for uplifting reading if you happen to be a resident of Halifax.
One factoid, to my way of thinking, stands out: when it comes to the census metropolitan area with the highest population growth rate from 2018-2019, the winner is the kind of place you would expect — the Ontario tech mecca of Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo.
Second-place is a tie between London and Ottawa. Third place, another draw, is where I would like to direct your attention.
I can’t speak with any authority about Saskatoon, which experienced 2.2 per cent year-to-year population growth.
But I live in Halifax, the place that it is tied with for third, which may come as a surprise to folks elsewhere labouring under the old Halifax-the-quaint-little-city-by-the sea narrative.
That, of course, has not been true for a long, long time. Now perhaps it should finally be vanquished, once and for all.
If you keep clicking on the aforementioned StatCan tables, sooner or later you will come to one that shows the longer-term population trend, which proves this isn’t some single-year blip.
From 2015 to 2016 we gained some 6,000 people. During the next year nearly 8,000 more made their residence here. From 2017-2018 Halifax’s population climbed by around 9,000.
The most recent figure is stirring enough that I’m forced to be precise: 9,747 new people now call Halifax home.
“The momentum seems to be building,” according to Neil Lovitt, vice-president planning and economic intelligence, at Turner Drake and Partners Ltd., the Halifax-headquartered real estate consulting company. “It seems to have real staying power.”
He’s the kind of guy who likes to dig into numbers like these. When he did so in the latest pile of data from our national statistical agency, he found good news all over the place.
The population increase, for example, is being led by folks in the 25 to 40 age range, and then by the over-55 crowd, which squares with what a lot of us have been hearing anecdotally.
Younger people — and even those not so young — are being driven here by the exorbitant real estate prices in other cities: the average house in Halifax-Dartmouth goes for $331,098 according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, about one-third of what a similar home fetches in Greater Vancouver, and 40 per cent of what it costs to buy a pile of bricks right in metro Toronto.
Those doing their due diligence know that Halifax’s unemployment rate, at the same, time, is lower than it is in Toronto and Calgary and about the same as Montreal.
The way Lovitt sees it, people at a later stage in life may be cashing out of the real estate boom in bigger, pricier places like Toronto, and concluding that down east, for a wide range of reasons, would just be a better place to retire.
Yet the population boomlet is broader than that. The city has also gained nearly 20,000 new Canadians over the past five years, in part surely because of Ottawa’s decision to up the province’s immigration quotas.
That wave is transforming the look and sound of this city, which once had a reputation for intolerance, where any anti-immigration by long-time residents is now declared in hushed tones.
What is more, the exodus to parts West, which was slowing, has now reversed, due mostly to the slump in oil prices. Last year, when traffic both ways was taken into account, we’d gained 1,590 residents from elsewhere in the country.
There’s a couple of ways of looking at that. Our sons and daughters could be saying the good times, for now, are gone in Alberta, so why stick around. Except there are lots of places to go in this world, so they must be coming here for a reason.
Here’s something else: in-migration from elsewhere in the province, intraprovincial migration, is slowing down, a sign possibly that things are getting better out beyond the city limits.
Don’t take my word for it. As proof, I offer up the year-to-year population increases recorded by Truro, Kentville, New Glasgow, and Cape Breton, which, although razor-thin, are still something, aren’t they.
The implication, as Lovitt points out, is that some of the population growth is spreading out into the country-side.
To that I say, hallelujah. I’ve written many times in this space about the apparent emptying out of rural Nova Scotia. But all new narratives start somewhere.
That thought, it seems to me, is as good a way as any to start a long weekend in February.
