Numbers

An excerpt from Saturday's letter to the Telegram by Richard Cashin, Ed Hearn, and Dennis Browne, one of a flurry of lengthy Muskrat Falls-related letters which, sadly, do not make it to the paper's public web site:

All this comes at a time in which our population growth is declining and aging. The burden of Muskrat Falls will be heavy on our taxpayers as well as our ratepayers. Here are some population figures.

     1989.......................576,000
     1992.......................580,000
     2000.......................527,000
     2004.......................517,000
     2015.......................520,000
     2019.......................514,000
     2025.......................513,000

It's not entirely clear where Cashin the authors got those "figures", but they are already more optimistic than the population projections which Nalcor submitted to the Public Utilities Board, which are.

     2011.......................513,000
     2015.......................515,000
     2019.......................510,000
     2025.......................507,000

As this corner has previously noted even these figures are already over-optimistic and out of date: the latest Statistics Canada estimate pegs the population of the entire province at under 511,000. The truly relevant population — that of the Island Interconnected service area — is even smaller, excluding, as it does, 25- to 30,000 in Labrador, plus several thousand more living in isolated diesel communities in Newfoundland.


[Edited to credit all the authors of the letter.]