I will say thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank everyone for coming today and providing the final recommendations and information to the committee. It fully reiterates in many respects what we've heard all along, but I will add that some of Mr. Haan's comments are new. I would endorse them entirely, except perhaps some of the tax stuff.
The morbid tale also continues, and I just want to add a little bit of additional information, focused on one generation.
From 1992 until 2017 tells a slightly different tale, and you can see this information from StatsCan. The national population was 28 million; Newfoundland's population was 580,000; Prince Edward Island's population was 136,000; Nova Scotia's population rounds up to 920,000; and New Brunswick's population was 748,000.
Between then and July 1 of this year, 2017, the national population grew to 36.7 million, by 31%. Newfoundland's has fallen to 528,000, down 10%; Prince Edward Island—even though Dr. Ramos said that it was the most rural of the Atlantic provinces, I'm sure the people in Prince Edward Island disagree, because almost all of them live within 30 kilometres of Charlottetown or Summerside—posted fairly reasonable growth in our area, up to 152,000. It was flat in Nova Scotia, at 953,000 and flat in New Brunswick at 759,000.
Over the last generation, this has been a problem. Newfoundland has suffered the collapse that everyone else is looking at. We suffered the collapse because of the cod moratorium. Now we're suffering an eco-crash, but the demographics are clear. Now that births under-count deaths, it's something that's going to happen.
It's not just in Atlantic Canada; it's happening all over the world. Eastern Europe—our delegation just came back from Sofia, Bulgaria, and yesterday we met with the Croatian delegation—is also suffering from exactly the same migration trends that Atlantic Canada is suffering from. It's a worldwide problem, and I fully endorse Mr. Haan's comments about the competitive nature of seeking out highly qualified and skilled labour, because as we start to do this now, it will be Germany looking for those immigrants in 10 years, because they will not be able to get any more from Bulgaria.
There was a very interesting paper published this past month by Alvin Simms and Jamie Ward of the Harris Centre regional analytics laboratory, “Regional Population Projections for Newfoundland and Labrador 2016 to 2036”. They take a look at lots of different measures, and they include all the labour-related endorsements that try to fill the labour positions as they're available under all different scenarios. Even under the highest labour replacement scenarios, which is a large driver for immigration, Newfoundland and Labrador still loses 4% of its population over the next 20 years, but anyone who takes a realistic view of it sees that we lose 10% or more of our population. It's another collapse.
In order for us to maintain our standards of living, this is an imperative, so I ask all the witnesses, given that we've now had 25 years of stagnant or falling growth, what can we do differently? Could the Atlantic immigration pilot be the silver bullet to help us? Is it something we should do?
I'll start with Mr. Haan.