[DM] "Going west no more"

I've a post up at Demography Matters, highlighting the fact that in the wake of the falling price of oil the sort of labour migration to the Alberta oil sands that once subsidized communities across Canada is no more. Also, does anyone know of other, similar ongoing movements of people within high-income countries?

[LINK] "Saving Toronto's TV Heritage, One Tape at a Time"

Torontoist's Jerad Gallinger has a post up interviewing Ed Conroy, creator of the YouTube channel Retrontario, an online archive of hundreds of vintage clips from Ontario television, some dating as far back as the 1940s.

What drives you to do it? An ironic love of the retro? Pride in your city? Boredom?

Certainly a pride for the city and the province. Most of this stuff was welded into our psyche, but I realized a few years ago that it was in danger of disappearing into the great black hole of history—once people's home-recorded VHS or Beta tapes bite the dust, then the only people left with recordings of this type are TV stations and ad agencies, neither of whom have a great track record for preservation.

YouTube is brilliant for people who like to mainline nostalgia, and since no one was focusing on Ontario-based stuff, I saw an opportunity to rekindle some retro love for our city's awesome televisual past. Plus the responses the videos get—for example, some people send me pictures of themselves crying when watching Polka Dot Door clips—is quite touching.

"Bif Naked - Spaceman (Boomtang Boys Remix) (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

[LINK] "Fertile France's population continues to grow"

France's population continues its relatively strong growth.

Boasting one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, France saw its population grow by 0.6 per cent last year, to an estimated 64.3 million people, the government's statistics office INSEE said on Tuesday. Some 834,000 children were born on French territory in 2008, the highest number since 1981, INSEE said. That figure was all the more remarkable in that the number of child-bearing women has declined by some 2 per cent since 1999.

France's population growth was therefore the result of a fertility rate that surpassed the threshold of 2 children per female, which represents the highest rate, along with that of Ireland, among the 27 members of the European Union.

In addition, the percentage of children born out of wedlock continued to increase in France, with more than 52 per cent registered last year, an increase of 10 per cent over 10 years, INSEE said.

At the same time, both life expectancy and infant mortality rate remained stable in 2008.

A boy born in France last year can expect to live 77.5 years, while the life expectancy of a French girl born in 2008 was 84.3 years, virtually the same as in 2007.

French infant mortality rate stood at 3.8 per 1,000 births in 2008, identical to that from the previous two years but considerably improved over the figure of 4.8 in 1998.

INSEE has more, in French, here, making the additional point that France includes another seven hundred thousand on top of the cited 64.3 million, in the French overseas collectivities of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Mayotte, Saint Pierre-et-Miquelon, Wallis and Futune, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Barthélemy.