For the past 20 months, people have been wondering what the impact really would be of shuttering Units 4 and 5 at the Boundary Dam Power Station.
We still don’t know for certain, and we won’t know until Units 4 and 5 come offline in 2021 and 2024, respectively, but we received a better look to the future through the socio-economic assessment released by the City of Estevan on Monday.
We already knew some of the details. SaskPower estimates that about 40 jobs will be lost from Boundary Dam, but they won’t be laying people off, thanks to attrition and transfers, either to other parts of Boundary Dam or other power facilities in the province. Still, the people who are transferred out of Estevan will create a big blow for the community.
And we knew that the biggest blow would be at the local mines, with hundreds of jobs likely to be lost. These are good-paying jobs for people who love their work and are proud to say that they work at the mines, and you can understand people’s concerns about the future of mining in the Estevan area.
But this assessment also considers job losses in other sectors due to the lost jobs at the mines, since there won’t be as much money being spent in the community, and the population loss Estevan is destined to suffer.
The projections for population loss might be an underestimation, as it calls for a four or five per cent reduction in numbers, rather than the thousands of people many are expecting to see. Some expect Estevan will one day become a ghost town without our mines.
Perhaps the biggest eye-opener is the projected contraction for the city’s gross domestic product, which is expected to drop by $200 million per year each of the first five years from 2025-2029. When you consider that we’re looking at losing hundreds of good-paying jobs with an average wage of around $100,000, and the resulting negative spinoffs, and when you consider what coal mining means to the overall economy of the Estevan area, it’s not surprising that Estevan would suffer a $1 billion loss to GDP over a five-year span.
While some will question why the city had this assessment that told us the things that we essentially already knew, and why we needed a document that paints such a gloomy picture, this document was certainly the right move by the city. It put a number on some of the things we can expect to see happen, while giving projections on what could happen in Estevan moving forward.
It gave us answers. Sometimes it’s best not to ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to, but in this instance, we need answers as those left in charge of charting the economy for the next few years need as much information as possible, even if that information is a projection.
And it should show us just how much this is going to hurt a city with a population of around 11,000 or 12,000 people (depending who you talk to), and an area with a population of around 15,000 (again, depending who you talk to).
It’s great that the provincial and federal governments have stepped forward with financial support, but we’re going to need a lot more. We can’t just look at the money we’re going to receive in the next three years and say that it’s good enough.
When it comes to the changing dynamics of the community and the need to diversify the area, good enough isn’t a phrase that we can use in the next few years.
