Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity to provide to this committee some facts on demographics in Atlantic Canada.
I will focus today on four messages. First, an important shift occurred recently, as we've seen more deaths than births in Atlantic Canada. This means that future population growth in Atlantic Canada will have to come from other components, such as immigration or internal migration.
I will also show on the PowerPoint presentation that was distributed that in recent years the Atlantic provinces have had some issues related to attracting immigrants and in preventing their population from leaving to other provinces or territories of the country.
Finally, I will conclude by nuancing these trends and showing that some regions of Atlantic Canada are actually growing, mostly urban areas.
On slide 3 you can see that in 2013, for the first time, there were more deaths—the line in red—than births in the Atlantic provinces. Births are the line in green, leading to what we call negative natural increase. This is a first in Canadian demographics. Natural increase is actually negative for one region in the country.
According to Statistics Canada population projections, the gap between deaths and births could increase in coming years, basically due to an aging population. A large share of the population, mostly baby boomers, are now moving into their senior years where mortality rates are higher, leading to an increasing number of deaths in the Atlantic provinces, as elsewhere. Population growth is low, fertility is fairly stable, and the number of births is not increasing and is even showing a slight downward trend, which lead to this situation.
On slide 4, we see that, as a result, population growth in the Atlantic provinces has to come from sources other than growth—