Is Nunavut’s population “explosion” just an alarmist myth?

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT – It’s so oft repeated now in connection with warnings about health-care costs, housing shortages and bursting welfare rolls, that some politicians have begun to take Nunavut’s population “explosion” as an article of faith.

Iqaluit MLA Ed Picco recently joined his voice to the chorus of concern, rising in the Legislative Assembly to appeal to the Government of the Northwest Territories for a “family planning strategy.”

When Baffin leaders meet later this year, the so-called baby boom is expected be high on their agenda.

Not surprisingly, given a natural reluctance to discuss the touchy subject of sex and human reproduction, the best that Health Minister Kelvin Ng has mustered so far in response to calls for a family planning awareness campaign, is to promise to address the issue in a future minister’s statement.

Still, it seems no reference to Nunavut today would be complete without at least some mention of the territory’s distinct demographic profile – usually in grave tones.

Health and social workers worry about being able to meet future demand for their services. Municipal planners wring their hands over housing needs of the next millennium.

No cause for alarm

Nunavut does have a young population and statistics do show a birth rate that is probably the highest in Canada.

But should we be worried?

Probably not, according to one of Canada’s top demographic experts.

“I would personally think that was a positive, rather than a negative situation,” Thomas McCormack, president of Strategic Projections Inc. recently told Nunatsiaq News.

McCormack, who is scheduled to address a conference of community economic development workers in Iqaluit next week, makes his living helping governments and industries project future spending requirements and business opportunities based on population trends.

He likes to point out that historically, economic development in Canada was tied to, and indeed, would not have been possible without some population growth.

“In a sense, the more people you have, the more they’re going to need, and the more they need, the more jobs that will be created,” McCormack says.

In southern populations, for instance, the so-called baby-boomers born during a period of unusual fecundity between the 1940s and the mid-1960s, have been a powerful economic force.

One hundred years ago, in a deliberate process of nation-building, massive flows of European immigrants settled the western provinces, driving population growth in Canada to rates that have rarely since been matched in any jurisdiction of the country.

“If there really is a population boom underway in Nunavut – and I suspect it isn’t as rapid as it was in those provinces in the early 1900s – I suspect it will have a very positive outcome.”

Double the national rate

According to the latest figures from the NWT Bureau of Statistics, Nunavut had an annual birth rate of just under three per cent in 1996. That’s more than double the national average of 1.2 per cent.

Based on conservative estimates of birth and rates, at least one researcher in the North has projected that Nunavut’s population will reach more than 30,000 within two decades.

And that projection doesn’t account for effect of in-migration from the South as a result of the creation of the Nunavut government.

But what demographers call the crude, or simple, birth rate – the total number of births in a given year, divided by the size of the population – doesn’t tell the whole story.

“Of course the total population isn’t in a position to give birth,” McCormack said. “Only females between the ages of 15 and 45 are in a position to give birth. So it’s far more useful to look at the fertility rate among that particular group than the total.”

More moms, more babies

On weekdays when she’s not in class, you can usually find 18-year-old Hannah Uniuqsaraq visiting her baby Michael at the Infant Development Centre, located in a quiet wing of Inukshuk High School in Iqaluit.

The Grade 11 student confesses that the demands of parenthood and her studies can be a little overwhelming at times: between homework and housework, 20-hour days are not uncommon.

Yet she remains fixed on her goal of going to university and becoming a teacher some day.

While many other teenage moms are not so fortunate, Uniuqsaraq counts herself lucky to have the support of a boyfriend, her family and the community.

“If it weren’t for the daycare,” she muses, “I’d probably have to give Michael up for adoption.”

The sheer cost of keeping a child in diapers and baby food had preoccupied Uniuqsaraq long before she gave birth five months ago.

Now, even with her boyfriend’s salary, finances are tight. Which is why she says she plans to wait at least 10 years before considering bringing another child into the world.

“If I’m going to add another member to our family I want to be secure financially, with a house of our own,” Uniuqsaraq says. “I don’t want to struggle all the time.”

Hannah Uniuqsaraq and women like her seem to defy conventional thinking about Nunavut’s birth rate and what its implications are for future growth.

Fertility rates in decline

Ed McKenna, a community economic development advisor who is working with the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development, began probing Nunavut’s population question last year.

What he found came as a surprise: although the current birth rate is indeed higher in Nunavut than in the western Arctic or elsewhere in Canada, fertility rates actually appear to be in decline.

That means women of child-bearing age today, on average, are having fewer children than women of their mothers’ generation – the same trend that has characterized southern populations for decades.

“We’re not dealing with an uncontrolled, rampant population growth here,” McKenna insists.

“It’s a very deliberate kind of situation where we just happen to have a lot of people of child-bearing age, and of course they’re having children – as we all want to have children. But they’re not being irresponsible at all.”

Nunavut’s own echo

The high birth rate that Nunavut is experiencing now (it varies from a high of 5.7 per cent in Whale Cove to a low of 2.2 per cent in Grise Fiord) may, in fact, be what Canadian demographer and author David Foot has described as the “echo” effect: a rise in births attributed to young adults who were themselves born in a population “boom.”

Inuit population growth did explode in the eastern Arctic in the 1960s and early 1970s, McKenna notes, apparently the byproduct of better health and social conditions made possible by the establishment of permanent communities.

In other words, Nunavut’s high birth rate is really the effect of past high fertility rates, McKenna suggests, a factor which may no longer characterize young Inuit families.

Family sizes normal

According to its 1996 statistical profile, the NWT Bureau of Statistics reported that Nunavut families have, on average, 2.2 children.

That figure is only slightly above what demographers consider to be a natural replacement fertility rate for any population.

Still, sex and reproduction are a source of consternation for social planners.

“I see an awful lot of one-parent families and the vast majority of them are young single women,” Roger Sevigny, director of social services with the Town of Iqaluit says wistfully.

Indeed, StatsCan figures show that women in Nunavut tend to have their babies earlier in life than women in southern Canada.

Yet mortality rates, especially among older northerners, also continue to moderate population growth in Nunavut. This is because northerners tend to die faster than southerners after they reach the age of 60.

“So a baby boom doesn’t necessarily mean your population is going to grow that much more rapidly,” McCormack points out.

Other factors are important

Ultimately, the question of whether a high birth rate itself is cause for alarm may depend on many other factors, such as how successfully young parents and the communities in which they live are able to meet the needs of a younger, better educated population.

Down the road, success will be measured, among other things, by Nunavut’s ability to provide meaningful employment for Hannah and her son.

It will be measured by the wealth that future generations of Nunavut residents are able to create for themselves, and their ability to seize opportunities that population growth presents.

Settling the Nunavut Land Claim was evidently a first important step, McCormack says.

“I presume [it] will provide a firm economic basis for the aboriginal population to start generating the wealth in the North and taking care of themselves.”