Greater Moncton Area marks another year of significant growth

Moncton is facing housing, health care and infrastructure challenges amid its growing population.

When it comes to growth, the Greater Moncton Area is once again at the front of the race with the census metropolitan area growing 5.1 per cent from July 2023 to July 2024.

That data puts the area in second place for the entire country, right behind Calgary which saw a growth rate of 5.8 per cent over the same time period.

“I think any community that is in growth mode is much better than dealing with decline,” said Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce CEO, Kim Wilson.

Adding, “from a business and economic standpoint, if a community is growing like Moncton is, it’s a really good attraction for future business to want to come here and invest in our community and they see it as a great place to do business.”

Wilson says the chamber, which currently represents 930 members across all sectors and sizes, has seen new businesses come to the area and be able to sustain themselves here.

However, a recent survey with its members in December did raise some concerns within the business community.

“The top three priorities in Greater Moncton for them is addressing the homelessness crisis, number two was housing, followed by number three safety and security,” she said.

Overall, she acknowledges that well welcomed news, at some point the rapid growth will need to stabilize.

“With the rising of our population, when you look at challenges of housing and safety and security, we need to kind of come to together as a community and decide at what point do we need to stabilize a bit in order to catch up with this growth because we need to be able to maintain and sustain the growth that we’re seeing,” said Wilson.

However, over the last five years, it’s been full steam ahead according to data from StatsCan.

In 2020 the population for the Census metropolitan area for Moncton was 158,135. In 2021 it climbed to 161,376. It was up again in 2022 with 168,581. 2023 saw an increase to 178,599 and finally for 2024 the population is listed as 188,036.

“We’ve been very intentional about this growth. We’re about to embark on our third strategic plan on immigration, so it means that the intentionality that we’ve put into it is working,” said Moncton Mayor, Dawn Arnold.

She says in the last year the City of Moncton had almost 1,000 new residential units come onto the market, which was a slight decrease from previous years, she says due to bigger projects coming down the pipeline.

“One of the exciting things about last years stats is that the missing middle was really well represented like more than half of the new units were, when we say missing middle, it means two doors and up to four stories, so more affordable housing units,” she said.

Overall, the mayor says the growth is welcomed and will continue into the future.

“17 per cent of our current workforce is newcomers right now, so we know that over the next 5-6 years about 130,000 people will exit our workforce in our province. We do not have that kind of growth right now, so we will continue just to maintain a stable economy. We will continue to have need for people to come into our community just to keep this all going,” she said.

Adding, “we have this economy that’s really doing incredibly well right now so it’s hard to get that engine started again if it slows down so the idea is to, maybe not grow quite as quickly, but maintain some really positive growth in our community.”

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