Minor Note on the Bakken

I remember when I first started blogging about the Bakken. I got a lot of notes saying folks would not move to Williston: it was too remote, too cold, too desolate.

I tended to agree until one astute reader reminded me there was a whole country north of Williston: Canada.

How interesting, then to read that Canada is the fastest growing country in the G8. I thought the growth would have been in the urban centers along the US-Canadian border on the east. It turns out I was wrong.

The growth in Canada has been in its remote, cold, and desolate regions: the Yukon and Alberta.

And I don't need to remind folks that too many families with children have now moved to Williston despite being too remote, too cold, too desolate.

(By the way, I blogged about the "family issue" maybe two years ago based on my 30+ year career in the US Air Force.)

The lede in the linked article:

Canada's population rose at a faster rate than any other G8 nation over the past decade, thanks to a wave of immigration and slightly higher fertility, census data showed on Wednesday.

The population of Canada increased 5.9 percent between the 2006 and 2011 censuses to 33,476,688 people, compared with a 5.4 percent increase during the previous five-year period.

Statistics Canada attributed two-thirds of the gains to immigration and the rest to a rise in the number of births.

The largest increases were in gold-rich Yukon and Alberta, which boasts the third largest oil reserve in the world. Populations in the two regions increased more than 10 percent over the past five years.

Dame Edna Interviews kd lang