Pages: 1 2

While Canada’s population has been growing slowly thanks to immigration, Saskatchewan’s population has been steadily declining since the 1950s, with more than 10,000 people leaving the province in recent years according to Statistics Canada. Most of those people have left the province’s rural areas.

To combat this problem, the Saskatchewan government launched its Graduate Retention Program (GRP) at the start of 2008 and expanded it to include post-secondary graduates from across the country last fall.

The GRP offers tuition rebates as high as $20,000 over seven years to graduates of approved programs who live in Saskatchewan.

While Saskatchewan may not be where most new grads picture they will launch their career, it currently has the lowest unemployment rate of any province at 5%. Saskatchewan also contains the two cities which have the lowest unemployment rates of any in Canada, Regina and Saskatoon at 4.1% and 4.5% respectively.

Meanwhile, the national unemployment rate is 8.7%.

Employers are actually having trouble filling the more than 6,000 jobs currently available in the province, with more than 1500 in Regina alone.

Page 1 Page 2