Mandryk: Familiar Sk. pop. loss renews old problems
By Murray Mandryk
Saskatchewan’s population growth may be stagnating, but the province’s problems surely aren’t.
It’s the decades-old Saskatchewan that paused for about ten years when oil and potash prices were high, and a strong agricultural sector truly had this province booming.
Building on a little growth we saw in the waning days of the last NDP government, Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party came to office in 2007 with the seemingly remarkable promise of adding one-per-cent-per-year to the province’s population or 100,000 people in the first decade.
Wall cemented his legacy by meeting and surpassing that accomplishment. However, things began to turn around in his last few years in office before leaving in 2018, leaving current Premier Scott Moe with that all-too-familiar Saskatchewan reality.
As recently noted by the StarPhoenix’s Phil Tank, Saskatchewan’spopulation grew by just 3.1 percent in the census period between 2016 and 2020— less than that one-per-cent-per-year that remains the Saskatchewan party and less than the national rate of 5.2 percent.
This is half the 6.3-per-cent growth rate from 2011 to 2016 and places Saskatchewan ninth among the 10 provinces, according to the Statistics Canada census data.
And Tank’s story points out an even more alarming trend — the old reality that where we are losing people the most is from the farms, towns and smaller cities.
While growth remained consistent between 2016 and 2020 in the province’s three largest cities of Saskatoon (a 7.7-per-cent increase), Regina (5.3 percent) and Prince Albert (5.1 percent) and some neighbouring bedroom communities like Martensville (9.3 percent), Warman (12.7) and Pilot Butte (23.4 percent) the remaining 11 cities were all below that 3.1-per-cent provincial average.
How stark this turnaround has been is best illustrated in cities like Humboldt, which grew by 2.8 percent (the best among the 11 smaller cities) and Estevan, which declined by 5.5 percent (632 people — the worst among Saskatchewan’s smaller cities) in the last five years between 2016 and 2020.
By comparison, Humboldt grew by 13.6-per-cent growth from 2006 to 2011, and Estevan grew by a 13.8-percent increase (1,399 people) in the previous decade, Tank noted.
Overall, the population area in Saskatchewan that Statistics Canada classifies as “rural” dropped by nearly two percent in the census period, with some southern Saskatchewan communities showing a dramatic decline. For example, Climax lost about 30 percent of its population, leaving just 137 people in the community — all part of a trend in which the number of employed in Saskatchewan agriculture fell by 22 percent or about 30,000 in the census period.
For Moe’s government, it spells the revival of a lot of old Saskatchewan problems with a couple of new twists.
The annual convention of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) in Regina last week highlighted a series of problems from rising fuel costs to poor cellular phone service and Internet connectivity to rural crime.
Problems like rural crime are obviously nothing new … and exist even when the province is experiencing better times.
But tough times do create more crime, including drug-related offences. And having more people spaced out makes it more difficult and more expense to provide policing services.
The same can be said for cell services (SaskTel has clearly been providing more towers) and even the costs of getting around.
People have become more dependent on their phones and the Internet because they are simply farther apart. They have to drive farther to shop because the population decline in towns and smaller cities means fewer businesses providing services.
These are all problems that were somewhat put on hiatus during Saskatchewan’s years of economic boom.
But they are problems now quickly re-surfacing as Saskatchewan contends with its old reality of a stagnating population.
It’s an old problem that the Sask. Party government needs to acknowledge and address.