SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, March 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The seven groups of the Parliament of the Canary Islands –PSOE, CC-PNC, PP, NC, Sí Podemos, ASG and Mixto– have approved this Thursday the opinion of the study commission on the demographic challenge and have agreed that it will reopen with the beginning of the next legislature.
The president, Luis Campos (NC), comments that there are two “determining” issues to face to guarantee the well-being and future of Canarian society, specifically the demographic challenge and access to housing that must be prioritized in the relations and agenda of work with the State Administration and in Brussels, “based on the legal recognition of the Canary Islands as the Outermost Region (RUP) which implies the adoption of specific policies to guarantee its development”.
“The magnitude and depth of the issues addressed and those that remain pending advised us not to close falsely with the argument that time runs out when the Chamber is dissolved,” he highlights in a note.
Many of the possible measures to be proposed, as he explained, require the appearance of new experts, among them, those related to the legal approach within the framework of the 2018 Statute, the basic legislation of the State and the treaty of accession to The EU.
In matters, he added, such as the containment of population growth, the economic model and the productive sectors, access to housing, socio-sanitary services, employment and the labor market, sustainability and the identity component.
The opinion also requests that the territory and its implications form part of the road map of the next commission and referred to planning, land use and the “turn” that can be given to adapt to the changes produced in the last two decades.
The effects of the double insularity is another of the pending tasks for the next deputies, he indicates.
Among the findings of the report, which will be definitively approved in the last ordinary plenary session scheduled for the end of this month of March, is that the demographic evolution, at present, “is very different” from that of 20 years ago.
FASTEST AGING IN THE STATE
“Today, the Canary Islands have had the fastest aging process in the entire State. We have gone from a pyramid to a rhombus, with a very narrow base that widens in the middle and becomes stronger at the top, without forgetting other aspects cultural, such as the various forms of coexistence”, he points out.
He also said that one of the most important legacies is that because “they are fragmented territories” in the archipelago there are “three different realities.”
Some islands, as he described, with a very significant population increase, others, stagnant and even with loss of inhabitants and the third, with a combination of the first two.
This “more self-centered” description, in the opinion of Luis Campos, reveals that we are dealing with the “management of balances” on the basis of four variables, the population, the territory, society and the economy, which are also “dynamic and diverse” depending on the idiosyncrasy of each island and in attention to the decided standards of quality of life.
