The recent report from L’Institut de la statistique du Québec projects that the population of the MRC Pontiac will reduce by about 5.2 per cent in the next 20 years. This is bad news. While the report’s prediction is by no means a certainty, the prospect of further population decline is serious, especially in light of the fact that Canada’s population as a whole is expected to grow by at least 7 million people in the same 20-year period, according to Statistics Canada.
Less people means less economic activity, which means less stores, restaurants, community groups and entertainment. It also means less taxes going to municipal governments, leading to less investment in local services and infrastructure. It creates a vicious cycle which keeps things on a downward trend.
Assuming the prediction is correct, despite being a beautiful place with a lot of obvious advantages, the Pontiac seems destined to remain sparse, unless something changes.
People generally determine where they live based on what social scientists call push and pull factors. Put simply, push factors cause people to emigrate and pull factors cause people to immigrate or stay where they are. Generally, pull factors include things like proximity of family, availability of reliable and good jobs and a high quality of life, while push factors would be the opposite of those things.
Taken at its face, push factors seem to predominate over pull factors in the Pontiac.
Based on the prediction, conditions will not be good enough in the Pontiac to keep people here and that needs to be reckoned with. However, in order to do so, we need to know what’s causing those bad conditions.
The most obvious problem is language policy. Bill 96 and earlier language legislation make it so Quebec is a relatively undesirable place to move to or stay in for anyone who doesn’t speak French, meaning more native anglophones will join 600,000 anglophones who have left the province since 1971 and new anglophones/allophones will choose to move somewhere else.
But language isn’t the only, or even the most important thing, that is causing the Pontiac’s troubles. Rural areas across North America face similar problems of decline.
Economic conditions have not been favorable to areas like the Pontiac since the 1970s.
Through a combination of deindustrialization causing good working-class jobs to disappear, the fall of private sector unions that made it so that working class careers were well paid and the increasing precarity for small farmers, the Pontiac, like rural areas across North America, face similar exoduses to the suburbs and cities.
Fixing these problems is easier said than done as they are largely determined by forces beyond our control, at least at a local level. No mayor or the warden can wave a magic wand to reverse these trends.
That is not to say locals can’t do a lot to make Pontiac better, especially those who work with the well-being of their community as the highest priority.
Buying local, developing the local cultural scene and creating well paying and sustainable jobs are all things that can make a difference. Officials at the municipal level have the power to make decisions about urban planning that can make or break the area in the coming decades.
However ultimately the real fate of the Pontiac will be determined by people in high places. That is, politicians at the federal and provincial level and big business.
They can choose to continue to participate in a global economic system that encourages a race to the bottom in terms of labour rights and wages or one that encourages local economic well being. They can decide whether to subsidize giant monopolistic corporations, or small businesses, community groups and worker cooperatives. They can choose whether services like health care are underfunded and centralized in urban areas or are well-funded and dispersed.
Predictions like this aren’t set in stone. The trends leading people to go elsewhere can be reversed. However, to do so we must address the systemic causes of the problems. The sooner we start addressing those systemic issues, the better chance the Pontiac has to prosper.
Brett Thoms
