What a difference five years can make.
When the 2006 census was filled out by the people of Canada, things weren't looking so hot in Saskatchewan.
We were coming down off the high of our centennial celebrations in 2005, still losing people to Alberta and British Columbia and everywhere else in the country. We needed more people to make our province work, yet couldn't attract anyone because of our "have-not" status. We had cheap housing, but that was because no one wanted to live here.
When the information gathered by that census was released in early 2007, things had already started to turn around for Saskatchewan. Humboldt and area had shown a population decrease between 2001 and 2006, but things were on the upswing here. Houses were selling fast and furious and for much more than they ever had before, and it seemed like new people were popping up all over the place.
Choking down those numbers from 2006, which looked pretty bleak, was a difficult thing to do.
Five years later, we're now digesting data collected by the 2011 census. And it's much easier to swallow. This data is actually reflecting the Saskatchewan of today, the shining star in Canada - something we were only seeing glimmers of five years ago.
Between 2006 and 2011, Saskatchewan recorded a population growth of over 65,000 people - the largest in any census period since Statistics Canada started doing the census every five years in 1956. That population growth of 6.7 per cent, which put us over the one-million mark, was the third highest in the country, behind only Alberta and British Columbia.
Saskatchewan cities have grown by 8.4 per cent, towns by eight per cent, villages by 4.7 per cent, First Nations by 15. 7 per cent and northern communities by 3.2 per cent. Rural Municipalities and Resort Villages did see populations drop by about 0.9 per cent each, but that's nothing compared to the widespread drops we saw just a few years ago.
It's really kind of amazing how things have turned around.
Instead of struggling to stay alive, small towns and villages are, for the most part, thriving. There's a sense of optimism in the air, and that stink of desperation that used to be excreted by youth fighting to leave this province is pretty much gone.
A lot of that, I think, has to do with our own attitudes. We're not clinging to our youth, clutching at them, begging them not to leave. We've actually turned into the cool parents, the ones who wave the young ones off, knowing with a calm inner confidence that one day, they will return, because right here is the best place to be, and soon they'll be grown up enough to realize it.
There's also no longer that attitude that the "best and brightest" leave Saskatchewan, giving those who stay here a rather hard hit to the ego, or the kick in the butt they needed to go to the cool province next door.
The change in attitude is rooted in self confidence. We've started to accept that it's okay not only to be from Saskatchewan, but to move here, and to continue to live here. Yes, we can still laugh at ourselves, but we don't do it in a pity-party kind of way anymore. When needed, we take ourselves seriously, we stand strong.
Sure, the winters can be brutal, and the weather unpredictable. We get floods and tornadoes and can get infested by different insects, depending on the year and what crop is in the ground. But the summers, though short in length, are long on sunlight and heat. The people are friendly, communities are strong, and there is room to breathe out here, even with over a million of us within our borders.
It's the place to be, for more people now than ever before. Which is pretty cool.
