A StatsCanada report showing population decline within the next year for the north is considered a warning by the President of a northern think tank.
However, Charles Cirtwell notes there’s plenty of work happening to improve the less than 1-percent growth Thunder Bay has had over the last two years.
“The marketing efforts, the encouraging international students to stay, the aggressive attraction of immigrants, the trying to be more welcoming to Indigenous newcomers, are all starting to see some….. micro changes.”
The Northern Policy Institute’s President adds growing the population will take years to do.
“They have models that can predict ‘Ok, if you’ve got an average family size of X, if you’ve got a population mix that has, as we do, a certain percentage of older population, they can say this how many children you’re likely to have, these are the overall historical trends of how many people likely to move in and out of your community.'”
Cirtwell observes the government reaches back decades for data in which to base it’s prediction.
And, he says what Thunder Bay is going through is similar to what another northern city experienced.
“Same sort of thing in Greater Sudbury, between 2017 and 2018, the population there went up about 1.1%. Again, it’s not Mount Everest on a clear day, but it’s in the right direction.”
The Northern Policy Institute President explains the government uses data such as tax and employment information to create a general model for the forecasts.
