Canada’s 2001 census results were released Tuesday. It’s a five-year head count, making the census-to-census changes less startling than here, but revealing trends every bit as challenging.

There now are slightly more than 30 million Canadians, up 4 percent since 1996. This matches the lowest growth rate in the country’s history and is the first time in a century that the United States grew faster. This slowing, say the demographers at Statistics Canada, mostly is due to an aging population, a dropping birthrate and stagnant immigration. It could, a decade from now, leave Canada with its first population decline ever, bringing with it labor shortages, economic contraction and, as the well-educated leave for better opportunity, further brain drain to make recovery even more difficult.

This should sound disturbingly familiar here in Maine, especially northern Maine. Even more disturbing, though, is the population shift going on within Canada and the direct impact it will have upon this part of this state.

The shift in Canada, as here, is from rural to urban, from places where economies based upon natural resources can no longer provide to places where modern, technology-based economies can. Nowhere is this shift more damaging than in Maine’s Maritime neighbors.

New Brunswick lost 9,000 people since 1996, down 1.2 percent. Newfoundland continues to get clobbered, this time down by close to 35,000, or 7 percent. Nova Scotia had a slight decline. The only growth was in tiny Prince Edward Island, but of just a few hundred souls. To the east, then, Maine has roughly 45,000 fewer neighbors, visitors, customers, potential business partners than it had five years ago.

Things aren’t much better across Maine’s other border. Quebec had its smallest growth ever, a mere 1.4 percent. All of that growth was in the Montreal end of the so-called Golden Horseshoe centered on Toronto, an economic megalopolis close to Maine as the crow flies, remote when it comes to other modes of transportation.

Across the country, Canada’s growth centers have one thing in common – proximity to the U.S. border. From Quebec to British Columbia, border communities able to cash in on U.S. markets and to capitalize on free trade grew an average of 7 percent. The border communities of the Maritimes have not enjoyed this prosperity. Maine’s substandard east-west transportation clearly is an impediment, harmful to itself and to its neighbors.

The Canadian census underscored another long-developing trend. There are four metropolitan centers in Canada that have experienced steady growth both in population and economic power – Vancouver, Edmonton-Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. This has sparked a serious public-policy discussion on whether Canada should continue trying to reverse the decline elsewhere or concentrate its efforts on its growth centers and accept decline elsewhere as inevitable. With its overtones of failure and surrender, this is an uncomfortable discussion for any society to have. It is one Maine should listen to closely.