Household and Population Projections for Canadian Provinces and Territories, 1981-2046

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is ultimately responsible for this little book, since the Corporation provided its author, Abraham Akkerman, with a grant to carry out the project.

What Akkerman has given us is fifteen sets of tables. Each one is organized by province, and by five-year age span, and each contains subtotals and grand totals. The first two sets of tables are based on data collected in 1976 and 1981 by Statistics Canada and the following thirteen sets, which are based on that data, contain cumulative projections in five-year spans beginning in 1986.

The information in the book should be useful to CMHC housing planners, to businessmen interested in future market trends, and to social scientists and social planners, although, as Akkerman points out, similar information is contained in two Statistics Canada publications: Population Projections for Canada and Provinces, 1976-2001 (No. 91-520, published 1979) and Household and Family Projections, Canada, Provinces and Territories, 1976-2001 (No. 91-517, published 1981).

Interestingly, StatsCan projections vary considerably from Akkerman’s. In 2001, for example, the former publication suggests that Canada’s population will be between 28,053,500 and 30,980,700, while Akkerman believes the total will be about 39,062,100 — clearly a figure that should please the country’s housebuilders. At this point, of course, it is impossible to assess whether Akkerman is a better forecaster than the government.

What one can do is evaluate the methodology he used for arriving at his projections. Unfortunately, Akkerman has left much of the detail of that methodology to another publication, providing only a two-page summary of its contents. Serious users of his data will have to, as he says, “review the referenced literature” — in other words, read something else Akkerman has written.