Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My perspective on this is shaped by my experience as chair of a commission in Nova Scotia that began in 2012, and reported in February 2014. We were asked by the provincial government to take an in-depth look at the Nova Scotia economy and our prospects for the future. We were also asked to engage Nova Scotians in that process.
We had two rounds of province-wide consultations. When we began that work we looked at the data sets surrounding both the economy and demography, and of course just like every other part of Canada, our economic history has always had those two things combined. I hale from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and during the years of the development of the steel mills and the coal mines there were waves of immigration, so those two things have always been linked.
The issue became more pointed, however, when we extrapolated from a baseline year of 2009 and looked at a projection, assuming that the same patterns would prevail in terms of net interprovincial migration, immigration levels, etc., and we pushed that out 25 years. It really painted a very stark reality, which I'll share with you.
The projection was that Nova Scotia's overall population would decline somewhere in the order of 4%. Unfortunately, the 18-64-year-old cohort, which is the labour market, would decline over that same period by between 15% and 20%. Moreover, we looked across the world, frankly, at sub-national jurisdictions—at provinces—that had experienced even a fraction of that kind of labour market compression, and there was no productivity or innovation compensatory economic lift that could accommodate that kind of a contraction in the labour market.
Demography in this case is not simply a tracking of age. It is a fundamental change to our province's and the region's ability to be successful on a long-term basis. The Canadian demographer David Foot has often reminded us not to be surprised that people get one year older a year at a time. But when you reach the point, as Ms. Lockhart indicated, of a demographic pattern in Atlantic Canada that is a bit of a precursor to what will happen in other areas of Canada, that kind of age weighting will fundamentally change everything.
In our economic commission report, we set 19 goals and it was no accident that the number one recommendation was for a tripling of immigration numbers in Nova Scotia. While that may seem a bit of a stretch goal, especially given where we were at the time in 2014, I'd remind the committee members that the number corresponded to Nova Scotia's per capita share of the immigrant landings at that time in Canada.
There needs to be a focus on immigration. Obviously the economic linkages are equally important, but I think the committee is aware that the track record of immigrants in Canada, generally, and in Nova Scotia specifically, is very positive with respect to their employment levels, to their having higher educational attainment levels than the Canadian population, and to their starting their own businesses and succeeding with them over time.
Our belief is that there does need to be a concerted focus on immigration, particularly with the dynamics in Atlantic Canada, and that it should act in concert with the kinds of elements of an innovation agenda and the start-up success that we've seen, particularly in the Halifax area. But, frankly, this is a circumstance, and I believe now what I believed in 2014, that without significantly enhanced immigration capacity it will be an exceedingly challenging economic future for Atlantic Canada.