Brandon officially reaches 50,000 residents

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This article was published 09/02/2022 (1448 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon officially has more than 50,000 residents, a milestone local sources say could help spur continuing growth for the local population and economy.

Population data from last year’s census released by Statistics Canada Wednesday shows that from 2016 to 2021, the population of Brandon’s census subdivision increased from 48,883 to 51,313.

That’s a boost of five per cent, almost on par with Canada’s overall growth rate of 5.2 per cent.

Additionally, the population for Brandon as a population centre increased from 48,345 in 2016 to 50,532 in 2021, an increase of 4.5 per cent. Brandon as a census metropolitan area, which includes a pair of neighbouring rural municipalities, had its population rise from 51,807 to 54,268.

The reason for the Wheat City’s population increase may be attributed to the migration of people from rural to urban communities, a trend observed across Canada.

“We’ve got a major health centre here and many health services here, so health is certainly a consideration,” Mayor Rick Chrest said Wednesday. “On the education front, we’ve got both a full-fledged university and a large community college, so that’s a significant driver. As a result of being the service centre and the hub of western Manitoba, we tend to have a lot more retail and service providers here that are providing for well beyond Brandon’s population.

“So then all of that helps us to continue to attract more people who want to settle in an area that has a significant number of services and you kinda get the best of both worlds. If I compare us to Winnipeg, we have almost everything Winnipeg has.”

Some grants offered by higher levels of government are based on population as defined by the census, so Chrest is hopeful that Brandon might qualify for more support going forward. He’s also optimistic that hitting the 50,000 mark will allow Brandon to attract more services and retailers for the benefit of local residents.

The head of Economic Development Brandon, Sandy Trudel, said there are two common answers to what the benefits of reaching 50,000 people are.

“If you talk to people who are in the economic world, they often refer to a population number of 50,000 as being the number in which the … flywheel begins to turn itself,” she said.

Trudel, however, doesn’t see it as a magic number that unlocks potential. It’s a good sign, but hard work has to be done to maintain economic and population growth.

Brandon’s growth isn’t the most dramatic increase for a Westman municipality. Neepawa is No. 13 on the list of fastest-growing communities with a population of greater than 5,000 after the number of residents jumped from 4,609 in 2016 to 5,685 in 2021 — an increase of 23.3 per cent.

Only Niverville (29 per cent) and West St. Paul (24.5 per cent) had greater increases in population by percentage in Manitoba.

“It confirms what we’ve always known: we are an extremely fast-growing community,” Neepawa Mayor Blake McCutcheon said Wednesday. “The census is showing a 23 per cent growth during a pandemic, so that’s pretty exciting. It brings challenges, but it also brings opportunities.”

Large employers like HyLife, which operates a pork-processing plant in Neepawa, are what McCutcheon would guess is an influential driver behind the town’s growth in population.

In an email sent Wednesday, the senior director of operations at HyLife’s Neepawa plant wrote that more than 1,600 people are employed there.

“We have grown tremendous partnerships in the community of Neepawa and the surrounding area,” Lyle Loewen wrote. “We wouldn’t have been able to build the synergies needed to achieve today’s success without these relationships. We are committed to Neepawa and have been thrilled to partner with the community on numerous endeavours over the years.”

Last year’s announcement of a new health centre for the town as well as the development of businesses and amenities like a new Best Western Plus hotel will be additional significant contributors to the town’s growth, he said.

Asked if he felt the town could handle a continuation of this level of growth, McCutcheon said Neepawa has been working to develop its sewage lagoons and water treatment facilities to the point where they could handle 8,000 to 10,000 inhabitants.

“It’s a natural attraction,” he said. “Growth brings growth.”

Something that caught the eye of Doug Ramsey, a Brandon University professor in the department of rural development and the acting director of the Rural Development Institute, was that for the first time since the 1940s, the population in the Canadian Maritimes grew at a quicker pace than in the Prairies.

“It’s the difference between 4.7 per cent and 4.6 per cent, but the point is that the Prairies, since the war years, had grown faster than the Maritimes and that just switched,” he said.

Factors contributing to that include people leaving the province due to the downturn in the oil and gas industries and people deciding to return or retire to the Maritimes because they have roots there.

Another trend that Ramsey noted is that rural populations are decreasing across the Prairies. From 2016 to 2021, the rural populations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta decreased by 1.2 per cent, 1.7 per cent and 2.7 per cent, respectively.

By comparison, the urban populations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta increased by 7.3 per cent, 5.5 per cent and 6.3 per cent, respectively.

Rural communities, Ramsey said, are considered to be any community with fewer than 1,000 people with a population density of fewer than 400 people per square kilometre.

That juxtaposition between rural and urban populations can be seen in the growth figures for the Brandon-Souris federal electoral district and the economic region of Southwest Manitoba compared to the City of Brandon itself.

The city’s population jumped by five per cent, but the electoral district which includes rural and urban communities only increased its population by 1.9 per cent and Southwestern Manitoba’s population went up by 3.4 per cent.

“In the Maple Leaf years, we had a really high growth rate,” Ramsey said about the rapid increase in Brandon’s population following the company’s construction of a pork-processing plant in the city. “There was some concern that once that ended, we’d go back to what we were. Brandon [had] 37,000 [people] for 20 years.”

If those were the Maple Leaf years in Brandon, Ramsey was asked if these might be the HyLife years in Neepawa. He said yes, but it also shows the importance of having an anchor because growth begets growth.

“Just because [the population] went up by 23 per cent, it doesn’t mean it’s all HyLife,” he said. “If you’ve driven through Neepawa, you’ll see. It’s very vibrant with businesses and schools and hospital upgrades and things like that. There’s just growth associated with having HyLife.”

The biggest loss of population percentage in Westman was in the Municipality of Glenboro-South Cypress, which dropped by 27.5 per cent to 1,123 residents from 1,550 residents.

While that’s a steep decline, Ramsey pointed out the village of Glenboro as a population centre only decreased by 12.8 per cent, showing the loss is coming more from the rural parts of the municipality.

“Even though it’s an incorporated settlement that people tend to go to when they leave the countryside, they’re not going to Glenboro,” he said. “They’re leaving Glenboro and they’re leaving the countryside, which is quite troubling to me.”

There was a revision to Glenboro-South Cypress’s population in 2016 but the reason isn’t currently available to the public.

According to Ramsey, while urban population centres were shown to have grown across the country in the census data, it also shows that the growth hasn’t been as strong in those cities’ downtowns. This could be, in part, due to wanting to have bigger yards and less exposure to other people because of COVID-19 as well as the increasing price of housing in core areas.

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