Key ways P.E.I.'s population is changing

P.E.I. hit the government's target population of 150,000 ahead of schedule, according to numbers released by Statistics Canada last week.

Revised numbers show the population passed that mark at the end of 2016.

The province also achieved another goal sought by many governments across the western world: the population got younger.

Data available on the Statistics Canada website go back to 1971, and 2017 is the first year since then that the median age fell.

The median age in 1971 was 24.8 years, about a year and a half younger than the Canadian median of 26.2.

The median age for Islanders passed the median for Canadians in 1999. At 43.5 years in 2017, the median age for Islanders is 2.9 years older than for Canada.

The median age is moving down because there are more young Islanders. The number of Islanders aged 45 or older continues to grow steadily.

The biggest contributor to the youth movement, and to overall population growth, is immigration.

Not only have there been more immigrants arriving in the last two years, a higher proportion of them have been 14 or younger.

But interprovincial migration is also playing a role. P.E.I. has been losing fewer people to other provinces in the last couple of years.

And there has been an even more dramatic change in some key demographic groups.

The number of migrants aged 14 and under, as well as those 25 to 34, is up. At the same time, the number aged 35-64 is down.

In 2016-17, more than 3,000 people from other provinces moved to P.E.I., the highest amount since 1989-90.

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