BOOM TOWN

For more than half a decade, Charlottetown has sustained the highest immigration rates in Canada. The influx has saved PELL. from demographic oblivion—and made it a case study in the perils of ultra-rapid growth.

-  Alex Cyr

ONE MORNING when I was eight years old, my Grade 3 teacher cut math class short and brought us all to the conference room of the small school I attended in Abram-Village, Prince Edward Island. There, a social worker stood in front of the small student body-about 120 kids-and announced that a new family was coming to our village. The Mazarabakizas were a family of refugees from Burundi who'd fled their home due to civil war. Their four eldest children would attend our school, and the social worker implored us to treat them as we would any other friends-regardless of their cultural background and differences.

If it seems a little extreme to have a full-school intervention on behalf of a single immigrant family, it was warranted in P.E.I. in 2003. Until the Mazarabakiza family arrived, I was the most foreign person in my class (my father is Acadian from New Brunswick). The population of our province was so homogenous that people sometimes identified each other by old family nicknames; on my mother's side, we'd been called the Joe Cannons ever since my great-great-grandfather Joe allegedly killed the last bear on the island with a cannon in the late 19th century. In my village of about 350 people, everyone was white-it is entirely possible that some of the kids I went to school with had never seen a Black person.

It wasn't just that the island lacked diversity-it was also trapped in a demographic death spiral. From my birth in 1995 to my 18th birthday, the island's population increased by only 9,000 people. Immigration was virtually non-existent, and young adults moved away in droves, driving up the median age from 34 to 43. I left for Ontario in 2017, because making a living as a journalist on P.E.I. seemed improbable at best.