09 Nov Two charts that drive home Atlantic Canada’s existential problem

Sydney resident Rory Andrews posted these charts to the community website GoCape Breton, but something very similar could be drawn for each of the four Atlantic provinces.

And to make the point even clearer:

Short of taking a reverso-page from China’s book and implementing a Ten-Child Policy, the only solution is immigration. Ad hoc, community-based efforts to encourage foreign students attending Nova Scotia universities to settle here should be rolled into a major provincial government effort with appropriate resources. And beyond welcoming university students, Stephen MacNeil should put himself at the head of the queue for accepting the Middle Eastern refugees Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to admit.

The usual response to that last suggestion is that any refugees who settle in Nova Scotia will move away first chance they get to larger centres where they can find people of their own nationality and culture. To which I say, not if we welcome enough of them. If we settled 10,000 or 20,000 Syrians over the next few years, we’d probably have the largest Syrian community in Canada.

Most of all, we need to get over ourselves, and drive a stake through the heart of that narrow minded attitude toward come-from-aways that has kept us comfortable and insular for far too long. If someone wants to build a golf course on an abandoned coal dump in Inverness, don’t shun their children or drive them away with petty insults and vandalism. Worry a little less about about Gaelic and a lot more about Mandarin, Tagalog, Arabic, and Farsi.