It is a recurring refrain of the election: there is no growth here. 

Candidates in this camp use the phrase “slowed growth,” but do not be deceived: they mean no growth. What is presented as a sober re-assessment in the light of a lagging real estate market masks the real desire: no newcomers. No new development. And definitely no expensive water infrastructure. 

It’s like Amy Winehouse on rehab. No. No. No. 

Consider how that turned out. 

They downplay even the idea of 1 percent a year, a number that is below the official forecast for the region. Eastern Ontario is projected to experience the fastest population growth in the province, a cumulative 43 percent by 2051. 

One of the talking points for this position, however, is that the population of PEC has been the same for a century. Growth? What growth? they ask. It is true. For about 80 years, the numbers were fixed at about 25,000. 

In fact, the 2016 Census registered a population decline to 24,735. But that climbed, gently, to 25,704 by 2021. 

And in 2025, the number was closer to 28,000. On the surface, it does look like slow growth, maybe. Moving the needle from about 25,000 in 2020 to 27,550 over five years, however, represents a 2 percent annual growth rate. 

But let’s look seriously at this claim: there is no growth here, or slowed growth, or the more brisk, we are going to slow things down and take a good long look, because all these subdivisions are just out of control. 

This last approach directly contradicts the first, but whatever. Slow is the word. No growth is the goal. 

As Anne Van Vlack of the County Foundation has been asking us to notice for years now, what might look like a slow growth rate is masking something else entirely: the County is losing people who cannot afford to live here and gaining people who can.

According to the Foundation’s Vital Signs Reports, between 2016 and 2021, the pandemic and the rise of remote work led to a surge in new residents. 6,240 people came to live in PEC during that pandemic period. They joined the 3,515 who arrived from 2011-2016. In total, that decade saw almost 10,000 newcomers. That is over a third of the apparently fixed population of the County! In a decade. 

And yet, the population held relatively steady. Where are those 9,755 new residents hiding? They are obscured, because 6100 residents left over the same decade. Why? Because of climbing real estate prices, gentrification, and a near total lack of rental properties. Younger people, families, and workers of all kinds are fleeing to more affordable places like Belleville, Brighton, Kingston, and Napanee. Anywhere but here. 

I have no doubt that the 2026 census, the details of which will be released over the coming year, will show that thousands more locals have left PEC since 2021. And that thousands more have come in to replace them, buying up the real estate the people who once lived here cannot afford.

The average home price in the County is $750k. Real estate agents must make a virtue of the fact that this is the one place in Ontario where prices are actually climbing. It certainly suggests a wealthy enclave kind of cachet. The Nantucket of the North. Or Martha’s Vineyard.

In Belleville, the average home costs about $500k. That bridge over the Bay of Quinte makes quite a difference. Why? Because Belleville has been building houses, apartments and condos, and we have not. 

Imagine if, like Belleville, we had had the housing stock in place to accommodate all those who fled the County over the past decade. 

If we had retained, in other words, our young people, workers, and families while still attracting that 10,000-strong in-migration of wealthy retirees, artists, and entrepreneurs. 

That apparently fixed-forever population of 25,000 would be sitting closer to 35,000. We would, in other words, be thriving. More tax- and ratepayers, more kids, more bustle, year-round. 

It’s our Lost Decade. Apartments. Townhouses. Rowhouses. Where are they? We don’t have the kind of housing stock we need. Meanwhile, as the Quinte Home Builder’s Association director Ruth Estwick reminded us in these pages a few weeks ago, Belleville was ready. It has absorbed our lost population — our lost opportunity. 

The current council has worked hard over the past two terms to put pro-development policies and infrastructure in place. But it’s been a Sisyphean task, like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep hill of opposition from the slow-to-no growthers. 

While real estate prices across Ontario have been dropping, they are still high, and still driving young families out of the cities. A swelling population of Ontarians in their late 20s and early 30s is searching for family-friendly housing and leaving the cities to find it. This urban exodus is why the developers are here. 

We need to welcome them, the developers and the families. Home building is a key provincial and federal priority. Billions in funding is being made available for anything to do with housing right now. This major economic engine is a key source of jobs for all the construction trades, service industries, and ancillary professionals in law, insurance, and banking.

Without decent housing development, the County will continue to follow this pattern of arrivals matched by departures — not growth but replacement. 

If we allow this great migration to continue, Prince Edward County will continue to evolve into a beautiful enclave for the wealthy. A high-end retirement community for Toronto. 

And there lies the rub. The chorus of voices that wants to slow — or halt — development claims it wants to keep the County what it has always been. But that very chorus is only driving on this great replacement. We need homes, concentrated along the established settlement corridor of the Loyalist Parkway from Wellington to Picton, close to transit and amenities.

We need to keep County people here, not drive them out.