Without trying to be overly harsh, the news we are again losing our young people to Alberta is likely less of a surprising development to rural Saskatchewan than it is to the province as whole.
After all, most of rural Saskatchewan never quite had the same reprieve from this trend that the cities enjoyed a few years back. (The exception being, smaller cities like Kindersley, Weyburn and Estevan that were at heart of the oil boom and likely most benefitted from it.)
Rural residents — especially those in the smallest cities, towns, villages and farms — have always faced the double whammy of not only losing their young people to Alberta but also to the bigger Saskatchewan cities like Regina and Saskatoon.
But seeing one’s kids move away is something no parent can ever gets used to. This may be why it’s the one issue in Saskatchewan that always hurts and never quite seems to go away.
That small taste of growth success that was enjoyed by some of the towns and smaller cities whose economy is more tied to the oil and only left rural-based communities hungrier for what could be.
Moreover, at least the cities can claim that they (and the province as a whole) are growing because of the influx of new Canadians that have arrived in this province. New arrivals have been a huge part of the on-going (albeit, somewhat slowed) increase in both Saskatchewan jobs and population.
And even though many of these immigrants are simply taking up service sector or retail jobs, they are still contributing to the economy. However, they tend to be contributing to the city economies where they have settled.
According to numbers from Statistics Canada numbers, Saskatchewan gained 53,921 people from other provinces since 2013 compared with 59,560 people who have left Saskatchewan for other provinces — a net-out-migration loss of 5,639.
But more to the point, half of those people who left for better opportunities in Alberta — an old, familiar story to parents from both the cities and rural areas of our province.
It is an issue made even more familiar by the politics of our province.
Many of you will remember the Grant Devine Progressive Conservative campaign of 1982 where one of the themes was “bring the children home.” Or you may recall the those 1991 NDP elections in which a bus pulls up at a farmyard and a young girl is given a hug by her parents before she boards that Alberta-bound bus.
Now, Saskatchewan Party is already running advertisements touting their record on population growth during the past decade, which is considerably better than that of the previous decade under the NDP administration.
However, the information is also framed as a loss of Saskatchewan people to Alberta. In recent years, that hasn’t been the case.
And why Saskatchewan’s out-migration record is so bad is now an interesting question because Alberta is clearly suffering even more from the downturn in oil.
Doug Elliott, publisher of Sask Trends Monitor, noted Alberta’s mining/oil/gas jobs in the first 11 months of 2015 declined by 11 per cent. But in Saskatchewan, the decrease was only six per cent in these sectors.
Yet overall job growth in Alberta in the first 11 months of 2015 was 1.4 per cent — almost triple the .5-per-cent job growth in Saskatchewan.
Elliott argued that this is why we continue to see young Saskatchewan people flock to Alberta for better-paying job opportunities.
The statistician noted that Alberta is even creating more jobs in the public sector areas of health and education _ a trend that started before the arrival of its NDP government in May.
We are again losing ground to Alberta — a reality that hurts everywhere in this province.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
