Capital Flight: The Charlottetown area is growing, but losing families
Earlier this week, Statistics Canada released its much-anticipated batch of sub-provincial estimates for July 2023, showing how the populations of Canadian cities and regions looked as of Canada Day last year. For Prince Edward Island, there were some really interesting trends as well.
The first is that all corners of PEI are seeing growth — urban, rural, Up West, and Down East. For the first time in years, all three of PEI’s counties grew by over 3% in a single year. This is quite a feat for the Island when, only a decade ago, each county was in decline.
It was also interesting to see PEI’s fastest-growing municipalities now include Souris (9.7%), Kensington (8.4%), Alberton (6.2%), Belfast (4.7%), Three Rivers (4.6%), and Mount Stewart (4.5%). Although there remains an undercurrent of growth in unincorporated areas, proportionally more of PEI’s growth last year occurred in municipalities (especially ones with planning capacity) than in years prior. The Province should be more aggressive in pushing for Island-wide municipalization to ensure that more communities on PEI have the capacity to support growth.
But the big news for the Island is that the Charlottetown census agglomeration is among the fastest-growing in the entire country. With a growth rate of 4.6%, the Charlottetown area is in the top ten nationally and the top three in Atlantic Canada — behind only Cape Breton and Moncton, and ahead of Halifax.
Just like in previous years, the Charlottetown area’s growth was due to a combination of international immigration, interprovincial in-migration, and intra-provincial migration — pulling in many new residents from other parts of the Island. Some minor unfortunate news for Charlottetown is that, as is becoming the case in other urban areas, deaths are beginning to outpace births.
However, the most concerning trend for the Charlottetown area can only be found when looking at two of those growth components (inter- and intra-provincial migration) across different age cohorts. While the Charlottetown area has generally been effective in courting movers from away, it has actually seen more children leave than arrive. Last year, more children moved away to other provinces than since age-based interprovincial migration data became available.
What this generally indicates is that families with young kids are moving to provinces with better economic opportunities. The outflows coincide to some extent with the decline in rental vacancy rates from 2015 onward. In the same year that a record-setting net 89 children left PEI, a net in-migration of nearly 10,000 children occurred in Alberta’s urban areas — including Calgary and Edmonton seeing 4,600 and 3,700 of those children moving to their cities, respectively.
I have written extensively about the issue of out-migration, especially as Alberta’s cities offer a low-cost alternative to life in the big urban centres of Ontario and British Columbia. One of the appeals of Alberta is its housing abundance, and its comparatively high rental vacancy rate (while 2.1% is still not ideal, I think renters would take that market over Charlottetown’s 0.5% vacancy rate if given a choice). Planning rules play a big role in ensuring that the housing market supply can keep up with demand, and Alberta’s big cities have taken significant steps to ensure that the supply growth can continue (see Edmonton’s ambitious bylaw reforms and Calgary’s recent vote in favour of housing liberalization).
PEI and the Capital area municipalities have the opportunity to match this ambition. Charlottetown’s revised draft official plan would nominally permit four units on all residential lots, four-storey apartments near the QEH and post-secondary institutions, and eight-storey apartments at major nodes. More needs to be done to ensure that housing gets prioritized over some narrow interpretations of heritage, but overall the revisions to the plan represent a matured approach to the demographic issues facing the Capital area. Across the Hillsborough River, the Shape Stratford project is proactively engaging the residents of the Island’s largest town on the topic of density to encourage support for new development. As a nod to promoting better alignment between land use and transportation planning, the Town has taken to advertising its campaign on T3 public transit buses.
The importance of these endeavours is made ever more clear by the data on young resident outflows. Interim numbers of migration since last Canada Day show that the outflow has begun to impact Islanders of all ages, but the loss of families with young children represents an especially acute threat to PEI’s long-term demographic health.
If families with kids do not have a place to call home, they will not stay in the Capital area, let alone the Island. Provincial and local policymaking needs to ensure that access to housing is prioritized in the places where people most want to live. In my opinion, a community is a living, breathing, and evolving place that derives its character from the characters who live in it — rather than just by how many buildings were there before the turn of the century. If we want the Capital area to be a place for families to settle and raise their children, we need to think of it as a growing urban centre rather than just a Confederation-era theme park.
Or as Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons would put it…
