The myth multiplies

A while back, someone on one of the VOCM phone-in shows made the claim that Newfoundland and Labrador has fewer people now than at Confederation in 1949.

If you were listening that night, that sound you heard? yeah, that was a cringe.

It isn't true, of course, but, having been uttered on the air, not only can it not be un-uttered, it has the imprimatur of truthiness about it, such that one Ernest S. Parsons, of St. John's, can write a letter to The Telegram, and it will be published, in which he says:

Danny Williams and the Progressive Conservative party won a majority government. We need opposition, regardless what party is in power.

The PCs should never have taken five or six months off from opening the House. They are well paid.

Furthermore, they should have a cutback on the number of members we have in the House, for there are far less people in Newfoundland and Labrador today than there was in 1949.

The population of Newfoundland and Labrador, in the last pre-Confederation census in 1945, was 321,819. In the first post-Confederation census, it was 361,416. Interpolating, assuming, for argument's sake, a constant rate of population change in between, at the end of the first quarter of 1949 the population would have been 348,200 or so.

On this graph, the red is actual census or inter-censal population figures, the orange is the interpolation, and the blue line is the estimated population at Confederation:

[Click to embiggen]

The latest inter-censal population estimate is 506,275. It's about 12,000 fewer than when Danny Williams and the Progressive Conservative Danny Williams Government took office, about 62,000 fewer than the peak census population in 1991, and about 74,000 than the peak inter-censal population estimates recorded in 1984 and 1993.

But it is still more than 150,000 more than the population was at Confederation.

But it's too late. The myth has been born; nothing, certainly not boring ole facts, will kill it now.