Paul Martin's Business Update - September 29th, 2014

One topic that has earned more than its share of attention in the past decade is Saskatchewan’s population growth. Ten or twelve years ago talk of population as a measure of economic success started to find some traction – particularly as a result of initiatives such the provincial Chamber’s Action Saskatchewan strategy.

The argument went like this: a province attracting population has something going for it. If people were leaving in search of opportunity there was a problem.

Well now we have more than 1.1 million people and our demographics have changed. We are younger. And we are attracting international immigrants.

A new breakdown of our demographics prepared by StatsCan offers some interesting benchmarks or insights to put this transformation into context.

First of all we went from one of the oldest population bases to a much younger one. In fact we stand out as having the slowest growth of seniors as other segments growing more rapidly. And, when compared to the rest of the continent we are #4 in terms of growth, exceeded only by Nunavet, Alberta and North Dakota. Utah is #5.

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