FLETCHER: BC, Ontario lead the way in falling population

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.I’ve had three neighbours move away in the last couple of years, all going from Victoria to Alberta. Seniors like me have mostly moved to be nearer their kids.One new neighbour has arrived from Edmonton for a provincial government job. That’s a microcosm of what’s happening across the country.Statistics Canada has released its preliminary population estimates for the fourth quarter of 2025. BC led the way with a reduction of 0.4% of its population in that quarter, continuing a trend that has seen the province’s population drop by 41,000 over the year. Ontario and BC tied for first in population loss for the year.Alberta continues to gain population, much of it from interprovincial migration, which has led the country on net arrivals for the last 14 consecutive quarters. But Alberta’s growth has slowed, largely due to federal efforts to cut down on the rapid growth in immigration.The agency warns that the latest figures are estimates, based partly on the federal government’s recent moves to slow down the huge increase in temporary foreign workers and international students that began as the Liberals tried to prop up a shrinking workforce after the COVID-19 pandemic. As Canadians have come to expect, what the government says and what it manages to do may not match, and StatCan doesn’t yet know how many extensions there will be for work and study permits..Then there is the surge in asylum claims, as people who used the loose foreign student system to get into the country for work suddenly decide that they are afraid to go home. And there is the fact that people whose work and study permits have expired may not have left. We don’t know where they are.But the overall trend is becoming clear. People are leaving Canada, many for the United States, and as always, it is those with the means and the marketable skills who are the most likely to go. That generally translates to the younger and more educated people, and it is evidence of the many warnings from business that when your top federal-provincial income tax rate passes 50%, taxpayers vote with their feet.A new Fraser Institute study measures one area of robust growth across the country — the size of government. For Canada as a whole, based on the think tank’s calculations up to 2024, government at all levels represents 43.6% of the entire economy.Fraser Institute analysts say that the optimal level of state share in the economy for economic growth is between 26% to 30%. Only one province is close to that level at 30.4%, and that is Alberta. Quebec and Newfoundland are around half government, and the Maritime provinces are hitting 60% or more..BC is at 40% and rising. Saskatchewan is almost at 40%, and Ontario almost matches the national average at 43.4%. The government's share of the economy has grown in nine of 10 provinces for the duration of the study, 2007 to 2024, and in the last five years, the public sector has grown in all 10.It gets worse. As former Fraser Institute economist Charles Lammam pointed out recently, the bigger the public sector becomes, the less productive it is. Visible clues to this trend arose from the pandemic, with a loss of experienced workers and managers through early retirements, and a work-from-home trend that governments are still struggling to reverse.The last point here is the most worrisome. During much of this extended period of growing public sector payrolls, the governments doing the hiring have all been running big deficits. The new salaries are being paid with borrowed money, and all of it has to be paid back with interest sometime in the future.In an effort to slow the growth of its record deficits, BC has expanded its sales tax to cover services like engineering and accounting. These costs fall on small businesses, including the shrinking ranks of self-employed people.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: BC, Ontario lead the way in falling population

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