Columnists
Open arms
All over Ontario, including here in the County, school boards are either considering or are already amalgamating schools, closing down buildings and selling those capital assets. It’s in response to a province-wide trend of declining enrollment.
Fewer young people are around to fill seats in classrooms, making the operating costs for decreasing school populations difficult for school boards to afford.
When the Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board (HPEDSB) makes a decision in September, the County could see several schools closed and sold the way South Marysburgh school in Milford was several years ago.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, nursing homes are bracing for an influx of patients over the next decade, expanding infrastructure to accommodate a need for more beds.
Canada is reaching a tipping point, coming ever closer to joining the ranks of Japan, Russia and several European countries in negative natural growth—a phenomenon in which the birthto- death ratio is reversed, and more people die than are born.
In 2011, during the last census, the County was inching closer to that population decline, with a higher average age than the rest of Ontario by nearly a decade, and with a population decrease in school-aged children of more than 15 per cent.
These trends have costly consequences. Through taxes, we all help pay for school, and for public pensions and elder care. Selling off assets like school buildings might help in the short term, but then those assets are gone forever. And those reduced numbers of children will bear the burden of the challenges of an aged population.
None of this is new. We’ve predicted and discussed the population shift for decades. And yet somehow, we still don’t seem to know what to do about it.
And yet there is something Canada has been doing for centuries to bolster a waning population: immigration. Since the beginning of the century, immigrants and refugees have accounted for more renewed population than Canadian births. Welcoming newcomers to fill in Canada’s population is a tradition as old as the country itself. In 1872, the Dominion Lands Act offered any immigrant to Canada 160 acres of land in exchange for a small registration fee, drawing interest from all over Europe. Since then, famines, wars and the promise of a good life have drawn people from all over the world to Canada to settle and make a life.
Lately, New Brunswick, working to manage the challenges of population loss, has embraced Canada’s effort to bring in Syrian refugees, welcoming more than 1,500 families.
The folks who created PEC Syria are doing the same here, bringing in enough young families to give a small bump to a tiny population.
For now, HPEDSB can’t manage to maintain so many buildings filled with less than half the amount of children they were built for. It’s understandable to want to let them go. But perhaps a renewed population, living and working and growing in the County will mean they won’t stay empty forever.
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