The National Census was out this week and the news was surprising for PEI. The population has grown quite a bit, when we arrived in 2016 the population was estimated then at 150K today the Island population is 165,000. Charlottetown has also grown quite a bit from 36,000 to 40,500 today. Greater Charlottetown if you include Stratford and Cornwall in all is 80,000 people, the greater part of the Island population.
Given the scarcity of housing in general at any price, I wonder how we manage to grow. The rest of the population on the Island is also growing. The provincial government would love to have 200K population. However I wonder how sustainable this can be given the size of this Island and fresh water reserve, constant erosion due to climate change. On average we have lost 30 feet of shoreline in 10 years, the storm have become more fierce.
Winter has gone into a thaw with milder weather which is usual at this time of the year. We had a protest of sorts here today by the anti-vaxers on the Island, no big trucks, more like pick-up trucks and cars. The crowd was not big a few hundred and I only was about a dozen vehicles. Most of the crowd look disheveled and in need of a good bath, men with big beards trying to look tough. The Convoy of the entitled selfish whiners. Community spread exist now in PEI, thanks to these idiots, including 14 dead in 3 months. The Premier Dennis King has announced a calendar to lift all the restrictions by 7 April. As for the rest of Canada, we still have problems in Ottawa and at the major border point of Windsor/Detroit a cost of 400 Million dollars a day. Hopefully this will get resolved this weekend. Fox news is doing quite a number on Canada right now. Also 60% of all the funds given to the protest comes from the USA.
I was listening to Mainstreet which is the afternoon radio show in the Maritimes, in PEI it is hosted by Matt Rainnie, he was interviewing Tomson Highway on his award winning book Permanent Astonishment. Tomson Highway is Cree from what we call in Canada, Nunavut an immense territory 808,000 sq. miles with a population of 39,000 people. Nunavut means our land. I did visit its capital Iqaluit in 1984 in March. You have to fly to Nunavut there are no roads from Southern Canada, so it is very isolated. The majority of the population is Inuit, the Cree people live in the southern part near the border with Manitoba.
Tomson Highway OC is an Indigenous Canadian playwright, novelist, and children’s author. He is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award. His book Permanent Astonishment won in 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. It is according to him the first book of his memoirs, he plans to write 5 in total. He speaks Cree, English, French and Italian. I only read one page of this book and I was hooked, it is beautiful writing, the way books use to be written 50+ years ago.
Larry Muffin At Home 