Like rabbits

Tory leader Danny Williams today elaborated more on his population plan. As the Telegram online quotes him as saying:

I’d love to see (the population) double, but we’ll have to do it incrementally… What we have to do first of all is reverse the outmigration.

On CBC On the Go, a fuller extract was aired, including where the Premier made reference to the

dozens and dozens of people who are saying that either they’re back, or their families are coming back, or their families are about to come back. There seems to be a change in attitude, and I think, you know, that Hebron made a difference. It was kind of a reversal of what, I guess, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians felt was a negative trend that they had to go outside the province to work. But now I think they are feeling very good about the province, they see hope, they see security.

Today is September 25th.

The Hebron MOU – which is still a far cry from a development agreement, let alone the development itself, was announced barely over a month ago, on August 22nd. Very little information has been released on it, let alone enough to make any prudent people bet a job and a mortgage in some other part of the country on. Danny’s statement about how “Hebron made a difference”, in the past tense, is Dannyperbole at best, or dangerous wishful thinking at first.

(Given that it’s been only a month, and that the human gestational period is substantially longer than a month, Hebron has done nothing, yet, to increase the birth rate. Presumably it hasn’t done much about the mortality rate, either.)

But Danny is right on one thing: before there can be population growth, the current trends, those of net outmigration and natural population decline, have to be halted.

(Actually, one of those trends could conceivably continue, as long as the other was reversed to such a degree to compensate for the loss. But that’s math, and math is so hard.)

And that’s where things get really interesting.

If population decline magically stopped overnight tonight – either through net in-migration, or natural population increase, or a combination of the two – the population decline of the past decade and a half would screech to a halt at just over 500,000 people (if it isn’t already under that figure).

The peak years of population growth, contrary to popular myth, were in the first 25 years post-Confederation. The provincial population grew at an average annual rate of 1.81%, driven by a continuing high birth rate, resource development, especially in Labrador, and the massive investment in public works made possible by the infusion of federal transfer payments and cost-shared program funding. That rate was below the all-Canada average, but still better than five other provinces. It was also half a percent higher than the pre-Confederation average, starting with the census of 1836, and in the compounding game, that half a percent is a potent mathematical force.

At that fairly steep rate of population growth, even if it started tomorrow, it would take two years to under the population loss since Danny Williams came into office, a decade to undo the population loss since the population peaked in the late 1980s, and forty years for the provincial population to double.

In the century up to the end of the Second World War, the average annual growth rate in the irregular and decennial censuses of Newfoundland and Labrador was around 1.35%. At that rate, it would be nearly 2020 before the population rebounded to its peak level, and half a century before it reached a million.

More realistically, perhaps, in the brief episode of population increase associated with the Hibernia construction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the peak year-over-year population increase was 0.26% recorded in 1990-1991.

At that rate, it will take nearly the better part of a decade just for the Williams government, if re-elected, to oversee the growth of the population back to where it was in the fall of 2003.

It will take more than half a century before the population re-attains its historic peak.

And it will take 260 years for the population to hit a million.

Those demographic and mathematical realities are why Danny Williams is very prudent not to set any hard and firm targets… especially since, as he himself concedes, before he can start a new trend, he has to reverse the current one.