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Opinion: Is North Bay growing?

Immigration is the main driver of population growth across Canada
2015 11 26 casino roulette wheel

North Bay City Council members have a growth agenda. I wonder how it’s working so far?

All we have to go on is what we see around us. There is a new hotel under construction on Highway 17 and Gormanville Road. The COVID-19 pandemic will slow that down, if not stop it for a while. We have a casino under construction and an addition to Marina Point. There has been some progress at the airport industrial park and at Canadore College.

Apart from that, we see some building renovations going on, street repairs, waters and sewers, but not much else. A new twin-pad arena has a green light. Some council members see the city as a hockey town, despite the fact that immigrants are more likely to be soccer, cricket or basketball players.

I have nothing against hockey. I coached for 15 years, before switching to coaching another sport I like…basketball. Which sport of the two is growing in Canada and which one isn’t? Toronto Raptors are NBA champions and the Leafs, well, they’re the Leafs. And don’t say basketball is an American sport. It was invented by Dr. James Naismith from Almonte, not that far down Highway 17 from here. Cricket is a growing local sport and soccer has been strong for years.

The new arena may well fill local needs in the short term, but in the long term I foresee demand for ice time diminishing, and demand for gyms, soccer fields and cricket pitches increasing.

The national census is our only true guide as to how well the city is doing. Is our population going up, or down? The last census, in 2016, showed our population dropped to 50,396 from 52,405 five years earlier. No doubt some moved to Callander, East Ferris or West Nipissing. The next census is May of next year. The numbers should be available before we vote in the next municipal election in October of 2022.

Immigration is the main driver of population growth across Canada. In the last census we had an immigrant population of 2,745 people, or 5.5 per cent of our population. From 2001 to 2015 we saw 1,120 immigrants arrive in North Bay.

How many will we have in 2021? I don’t know and I pay close attention to immigration. I wrote recently about the surge in immigrant business owners in the city, but is that translating into larger overall numbers? We don’t know.

It was heartening to read the positive comments about that article. However, there is one person hiding behind a pen name who keeps commenting that immigrants get grants or loans to start businesses that are not available to Canadian citizens. That, of course, is not true.

The North Bay & District Multicultural Centre keeps statistics on new clients, but not all immigrants access its services, so that is not a precise barometer. 

The Rural and Northern Immigration five-year pilot program is designed to increase our immigrant population, but we were one of the last of the 11 cities in the queue for a program start and now it’s delayed even longer with the pandemic. Once it gets rolling it should make a difference but that may be too late to register in the next census.

The headline when the next census is released will be our overall population, whether it’s up or down. The next thing we should be looking at is the immigration numbers. That’s where the growth comes from.  If it’s still at 5.5 per cent of our population we’re not doing a good job selling our city.

We had an unemployment rate of 9.5 per cent according to the 2016 census. That’s not a good figure, and with the pandemic causing economic chaos everywhere, will we be in a better position in 2021?

Mucking through the census figures I saw the average employment income in North Bay in 2015 (the census is always a year old before figures are released) was $40,016. We had 2,280 people earning $100,000 or more, bringing up the average.

The median total income of households was $59,967, with one-person households at $29,970 and two or more-person households at $79,639. There were 7,205 one-person households.

The median age of our population was 43.5. It will be interesting to see if that goes up or down. Immigrants are statistically younger than the Canadian population and can bring the median age down if they are here in larger numbers. The average age was 42.7.

Our population is 12.6 per cent francophone, with 6,180 people speaking French, and 43,325 speaking English. Only 80 people spoke neither language.

The mother tongue total being neither English nor French was 2,130 people, or 4.2 per cent of our population. Another 155 people spoke aboriginal languages.

It’s a long wait until we get almost current reliable data. But, we should have it before we vote in October of 2022.

Editor’s Note: Don Curry is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant living in North Bay.