Growing and Building: PEI’s strategy and a half
PEI’s new population and housing plans are a good start but leave some questions unanswered.
If one word could summarize the PEI government’s work late last week, it would be Together. On Thursday, the province released Growing Together, the government’s population framework to help plan for 200,000 Islanders in 2030. Less than 24 hours later, the province released Building Together, which serves as the government’s housing strategy for 2024 to 2029. These reports offer some interesting insights into how different departments will plan for the rest of the 2020s, but it is not clear how they will all be Working Together toward an end-of-decade vision.
Growing Together offered a strong analysis of PEI’s growth trends and linked them well to the societal implications for the Island’s healthcare capacity, public infrastructure, emissions reduction, and housing affordability. The population framework sets out five reasonable (albeit vague) goals to guide policymaking over the coming years:
A highlight of the analysis is the explanation of how PEI will suffer in the absence of population growth. There would be value in reminding Islanders that a shrinking or stagnating population is far worse than a growing one.
“Without attracting and retaining residents from other provinces and countries, a smaller portion of our population will be tasked with supporting our residents through tax revenue, This, in turn, could result in reduced services and opportunities for growth. To ensure the sustainability of our industries and services, our population requires a vibrant, youthful, and trained workforce.”
Whether or not this was intended, the population framework does a good job of contrasting PEI’s income tax and health expenditure burdens, with middle-aged Islanders requiring the lowest share of healthcare costs while being the largest net contributors to government revenue.
Where Growing Together falls short is in the area of policy prescriptions. The document references goals at the start, but then barely follows up on how progress will be measured or achieved. This is a significant departure from its predecessor, the 2017–2022 population action plan, which had far more policy proposals to improve retention and recruitment. Even if the old plan did not capture the growth surge which began in 2020, it offered a clearer roadmap than the action items tucked at the end of this new framework document.
Interestingly, Building Together has the opposite problem. The housing strategy is strong on policy prescriptions but weak on analysis. The context sections attempt to pick up where Growing Together leaves off, but it does so with some questionable assumptions about PEI’s housing demand.
First, the government’s claim that housing starts peaked in 2019 is categorically incorrect. It is not the first time the government has made this error, but it is the result of tracking data only from 1990 onward (the reference year for most CMHC Housing Market Information Portal content). PEI’s glory days for housing starts were actually in the early 1970s — accelerated by a combination of federal programming and favourable taxation rules. We should strive to meet or exceed the 2019 figure, but we should not pretend that 2019 was our best year ever.
Second, the housing strategy points to interprovincial migration, permanent immigration, and international students as the core drivers of housing demand. The first two of these growth components are certainly the major factors for PEI, but the impact of international students on demand is generally overstated. Much like the rest of Canada, non-permanent residents have become PEI’s largest component of population growth. But unlike places like Surrey or Cape Breton whose non-PR growth is almost entirely due to international student enrollment, the Island’s main (and fastest-growing) source of temporary residency is now work permit holders.
That matters in the context of long-term population and housing planning because housing demand on PEI is not likely to fall much as a result of the anticipated federal policy changes relating to international student enrollment. International students are already enough of a target by predatory housing conditions and xenophobic scapegoats — there is no need to add fuel to the finger-pointer fire.
The third (and most nuanced) limitation is that the province’s long-term population modelling assumes an average household size of 2.4 people. This is a problem because PEI’s household size has been below that figure for over a decade according to the census. An overestimation of the benchmark household size leads to an underestimation of PEI’s long-term housing stock need.
This speaks to the biggest methodological shortcoming of the housing strategy, which is that it chooses to analyze average household size instead of household formation patterns. I have written about this issue before, but TLDR: average household sizes are a product of existing market conditions — they are NOT an indicator of true housing demand. They tend to mask the true needs of residents who may be living in suppressed households, or groups of individuals who would otherwise form their own households and families if housing market conditions were more favourable (e.g. young adults forced to live with their parents, newcomers confined to overcrowded households, couples forgoing having children due to lack of space or affordable ownership options, etc.) Above all, planning based on current household averages treats the worst forms of suppression like homelessness as business as usual and creates a disincentive for policymakers to address structural issues.
For a really good breakdown of its implications for PEI, here is what Summerside Mayor Dan Kutcher had to say about this issue in June.
The strategy should have instead considered headship rates, which indicate the share of the adult population that is listed as a head of their household, to determine housing needs. By comparing PEI’s headship rates to jurisdictions which offer better mobility for young adults and renters (e.g., Montreal Island), the report’s analysis could have been much stronger.
Despite my misgivings about these assumptions, the policy recommendations seem strong. Most of the ideas have either already been announced or actioned, but putting them all under one roof makes sense from a planning and priorities standpoint. For example, the policies relating to municipalities show how the province could develop its version of the federal housing accelerator fund by investing in infrastructure to enable growth and providing incentives for local land use reforms. While the report spends too long focusing on boutique novelties like tiny home constructions, it does not lose sight of the need to restore affordable housing and support vulnerable Islanders.
Land use implications are referenced in both documents, including an excellent breakdown in the population framework of the land use shifts that have occurred between 2010 and 2020. I have been raising concerns about the loss of agricultural land in the context of PEI’s growth but was surprised to learn that this pales in comparison to the loss of forested area.
For a province with such a scarcity of resource lands, this ought to raise the alarm bell for how to reduce further losses. But neither document references the cause for this issue: a lack of land and populations within municipally-planned areas. 2023 saw a decline in overall housing starts, but an increase in housing starts in unincorporated areas. This eats up precious resource lands while raising housing and transportation costs. If the provincial government wants to fix these problems, it will have to force the conversation of municipal restructuring. If designed with property tax reform and community placemaking in mind, most rural Islanders will not mind (let alone notice) the municipal restructuring that needs to take place.
Nitpicking aside, I think the documents offer a strong pathway for longer-term planning when analyzed together. Although Growing Together was too light on policy, its integration with other departments and governments creates opportunities for collaboration. And although Building Together could have had a stronger analysis, its recommendations are well-suited for the problems laid out. Now comes the important task of ensuring that the goals they lay out actually start getting met.
