Staff recruitment and retention are looming issues for businesses across Canada and yes even here in Greater Moncton as much of the population inches its way towards retirement and our population begins to shrink as death rates overtake our birthrates.

As a result, immigration has suddenly become a hot topic.

Everybody is scrambling to get on the band-wagon - the provincial government, the federal government and business leaders. So, what’s all the fuss about you might ask?

Well it starts with our demographers (that’s a scientist who studies the growth and density of populations and their vital statistics). They’re projecting that New Brunswick’s population will soon be in decline.

The problem is compounded when our young people migrate to Ontario, Alberta and BC looking for jobs and opportunity. New Brunswick is not alone with an aging population and declining birthrates. It’s a problem for much of the developed world.

A smaller population by itself is not a problem. It becomes a problem when customer demands can’t be met. It becomes a problem when skilled labour shortages limit production, productivity and innovation.

After the Second World War, thousands of young men came home to New Brunswick, some with new brides, others to marry the girl back home. As nature would have it, they produced children and continued to do so until the middle 1960s. Their children helped created a population boom and they quickly became known as the baby-boomers.

The problem in New Brunswick is/was that many of them left the province either before or after they produced the children.

To complicate the issue, baby-boomers decided not to be as prolific as their parents. The combination of birth-control and the shift to two income families lowered birthrates in the 80s and 90s.

Today, the boomers are retiring and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. Their children are entering the workplace but in reduced numbers. To make things worse, Stats Canada projects more deaths than births for New Brunswick in 2006.

Do the math!

• More deaths and fewer births compute to a smaller population.
• Fewer people mean fewer candidates for the labour force.

Okay, so you say “we don’t have a problem in Moncton because we’ve grown more than 15% in the last 15 years and everything points to continued growth”.

True, our population has been growing but mainly at the expense of rural and northern New Brunswick, as young people drained out of smaller communities into Greater Moncton. This well of recruits will dry up in the next few years and then we’ll find ourselves in the same boat as the rest of the Maritimes - fewer people, a declining tax-base, an older population and an increase in demand for health services.

That returns us to the subject of immigrants.

Immigration is nothing new to Atlantic Canada, just a forgotten thing. The original inhabitants of this province were aboriginal peoples. The French arrived in the early 16th century as first immigrants, the early beginnings of Acadia.

Conflict between the British and the French led to their temporary removal but many returned under British rule after 1764. More than 10,000 Empire Loyalists from the American Revolution arrived in the late 1700s.

The Scots and Irish followed in the 1800s, pushed out of their countries by political pressures and potato famine. In 1833, sixty six thousand people from Ireland arrived in Canada. Another 70,000 arrived during the potato famine in 1846/47. New Brunswick received its Irish bump in the 1850s when the population jumped 30%.

That was the last significant influx of immigrants in New Brunswick although we have continued to receive a few hundred people a year from various parts of the world.

Canada receives more than 200,000 immigrants each year. The federal Government wants to increase that to 700,000 a year.

Greater Moncton receives less than .001 percent of the Canadian crop. The vast majority of immigrants to Canada settle in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and more recently in the Calgary-Edmonton corridor.

Almost 75% of today’s immigrants are visible minorities, very different from the predominately European immigrants who settled the Maritimes from traditional source countries such as the United States, Germany and the UK.

Immigrants to Canada tend to congregate in communities where they can integrate with families and friends and share their religion, language and culture. That makes it difficult for communities like Moncton to recruit them.

If Moncton is going to recruit immigrants to fill the looming holes in its population and workforce base, it must have a plan to identify the source countries, to identify the skills we need and a plan to match the availability of skills with the opportunities that exist in Greater Moncton.

Moncton’s first priority is surely to fill its labour force needs from the community’s own resources rather than giving priority to people from abroad. Hiring the newly retired (most of our current immigrant population) or re-training the less productive would be a good start.

Creating jobs that will attract university graduates from in and around Greater Moncton and elsewhere would be a positive start. We need to hold more of our young people and to do that we have to offer them better opportunities to counter their prospects in Toronto and Calgary

Immigration, by itself is not a panacea but it’s one of the tools we must employ if we’re going to continue growing our economy. Immigrant programs for Greater Moncton should focus as much on settlement and retention as they do on recruitment.

I think it’s fair to say that Moncton could benefit from the breath of fresh air that an immigration recruitment and settlement program could bring to the area. It’s been more than 150 years since we altered the bloodlines in our community.

Maybe it’s time for a modest change.