New program to increase younger population

The provincial government has launched a new program geared towards new immigrants to tackle the problem of an aging population.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale said she's concerned there aren't enough young workers paying taxes to finance future programs.

Shesaid the province's demographics are scary.

"It's almost inverse of what it ought to be," she said.

"Instead of this broad base of young, working people at the bottom, and narrowing like a pyramid as you go up to your older people... Ours is almost the inverse of that."

A big part of the solution will be the drafting of a new immigration policy to attract young people to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Inna Levchuk came to St. John's from Ukraine with a masters degree in linguistics.

"I always wanted to see the ocean and live by the ocean,"she said.

"So this was the perfect spot."

She has been in the city for almost a year and has earned a post-diploma degree in journalism. However, she said she has had a hard time finding work in her field.

"The job thing is really important to me and I haven't found a full time job yet, so that's the problem," she said.

Levchuk said it may be her chosen field that is causing her difficulty in finding a job, but it is an ongoing process.

Inverse pyramid

Robert Greenwood, the executive director ofMemorial University'sHarris Centre, has been studying the inverse population pyramid that the province has been dealing with for years.

"A colleague who's a demographer said a while back, in 20 years, the average Newfoundlander won't have a brother or sister," Greenwood said.

"They won't have a cousin."

He said one of the more practical approaches to combating the inverted population is to encourage more immigration.

"There's no shortage of people in the world, and there's no shortage of people wanting a share of our fantastic quality of life," Greenwood said.

Levchuk said one way the provincial government can attract people to Newfoundland and Labrador would be to offer some kind of assistance in their job and housing searches.

Without a permanent, full-time job in her field, Levchuk will have to move elsewhere in Canada to widen her job search.

"If I don't find a job, I will have to leave [the province]. Otherwise, I will have to leave the country," she said.

In the last census, the number of youth in the province declined slightly, while the number of seniors shot up by nearly 17 per cent.