We shouldn’t be surprised to see the 2021 census showed a drop in population for the city of Estevan, the RM of Estevan and other municipalities in southeast Saskatchewan.
The number of people in the region has been in a slow decline for a number of years due to the price of oil, among other factors.
And while none of the communities have seen a steep decline, when you’re operating a village, town or even a small city, a loss of a few hundred people hurts. It affects the tax base, it affects the number of people who visit businesses and it affects the number of ratepayers in a community.
(It also affects the amount of money a municipality receives through per capita funding).
In the case of the city of Estevan, the decline is about 600 people, which is about 120 people a year, or a little more than two people a week. But it all adds up.
It should be noted that since the census data was submitted last year, the price of oil has started to experience a resurgence, to the point where it’s been above $80 per barrel, a level that seemed unfathomable a couple of years ago at the start of the pandemic.
It’s also worth noting that for the first time in decades, Weyburn’s population, in both the city and the RM, is higher than Estevan’s. For those of us with a seriously competitive streak when it comes to our neighbours to the northwest, it’s not something we wanted to hear.
Of course, when you factor in the surrounding communities, there would be more people in the Estevan area, since Weyburn doesn’t have a community the size of Bienfait or Lampman in close proximity.
The City of Estevan has long viewed the covered population report, compiled by eHealth Saskatchewan as the truer gauge of populations. The covered population document reflects the number of people in a community with a Saskatchewan Health card, as of June 30 of each year. During the boom years, this attitude made sense. The census did a terrible job in 2006 and 2011 of tracking how many people were living in Estevan. The covered population report seemed to be a much fairer reflection of the number of transient workers in the area.
But now that we don’t have the same number of people working in Estevan for the short-term or the medium term, the census is likely the better indicator of population.
It’s also worth noting that the population for urban municipalities is typically higher for the covered population report than the census, while rural municipalities and First Nations reserves have a lower population in the eHealth report versus the census.
Hopefully, this year’s census marks a bottom out for Estevan’s population.
We’re hoping to see an influx of people into the city with a strong price of oil, although we probably won’t see a comparable situation to 10 years ago, when the combination of the oil boom and the construction of the carbon capture and storage facility at Boundary Dam meant thousands of extra people in the community.
We’ve also seen a lot of new businesses open up in the Estevan area in the past 18 months. While none of those businesses would offset the number of jobs lost for the community when a unit at a SaskPower plant goes offline, all these businesses have added up to supply a boost for the economy.
We’re proud to live in an oil and gas and coal mining community, but we also have to recognize the importance of diversifying the community so that we aren’t at the mercy of the boom and bust cycle of oil and gas, or the cluelessness of some in government.
Five years from now, hopefully our census data will show a growing population.
And we’ll be ahead of Weyburn once again.
