Regina Leader-Post

Number of young people increasing in province

- JONATHAN CHARLTON jcharlton@postmedia.com

According to Statistics Canada data released Wednesday, Saskatchew­an has the highest proportion of young people among the provinces at 19.6 per cent. The national average is 16.6 per cent.

Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchew­an, said informatio­n collected during the latest census shows the need for a much more concerted effort to provide proper services for the province’s indigenous, First Nations and Metis people.

Saskatchew­an has a large indigenous population and indigenous communitie­s that have the highest birthrates in Canada, Coates noted.

Meanwhile, the life expectancy of the aboriginal population is lower than the Canadian average, “so that basically tells you that too many aboriginal people die young and die younger than other people. That’s not good news,” he said.

A high indigenous birthrate could be positive, but a lack of child care, health and education services could perpetuate that population’s challenges, he added.

At the other end of the age spectrum, the number of Canadians 65 and older increased by 20 per cent since the 2011 census. That’s the largest such increase since Confederat­ion and marks the first time the census counted more seniors (5.9 million) than children 14 years of age and younger (5.8 million).

Saskatchew­an’s older population increased by just 10.9 per cent, which Coates attributes to seniors fleeing south and west to escape the winter. He said he expects more seniors to stay in the province as cities grow and develop more services, activities and amenities.

While the growing senior population

is good news in that it means people are living longer, it throws off the ratio of people who are no longer working compared to those who produce the income that pays for government assistance and health care, he said.

Canada’s safety valve has been immigratio­n, Coates noted. Saskatchew­an has encouraged it, leading to substantia­l Vietnamese and Filipino communitie­s, among others. This has helped skew the population younger, as newcomers tend to immigrate at a young age, bringing their families with them or having children when they’re here, he said.

“Immigrants and new Canadians enrich our country in a thousand wonderful and dynamic ways.”

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