Rural

Newcomers to Canada overwhelmingly settle in urban areas. Why do so few immigrants settle down in small and medium population centres in Canada, and how can we encourage them to do so?

As Canadians look forward to the economic recovery and governments herald a new normal, few signals have been given about its policy landscape, and even fewer about the role of small business and entrepreneurs in the post-COVID strategy. With the horizon now in sight, how can governments move quickly to put a shot in the arm of small businesses and entrepreneurs that are operating in disparate and localized challenges and conditions?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted fundamental gaps in our agricultural system. For the first time in generations, many Canadians saw empty grocery store shelves and became acutely aware of the challenges facing our domestic food system. What followed were COVID-19 outbreaks on farms and meat processing plants and temporary foreign workers who were delayed and stranded. The pandemic highlights vulnerabilities in Canada’s food supply-chain and the importance of a resilient agricultural sector.

Past Event

What divides urban and rural voters? What unites them? In this second report on the Urban-Rural divide in Canada, Sean Speer and his team take a closer look at the Canadian Election Study and find that urban and rural Canadians have divergent opinions on many key issues, but they also agree to a large extent on many others. As populism grows across the western world, policymakers in Canada need to understand the implications.

Political polarization is growing across the globe. In this first report on the urban-rural divide in Canada, Sean Speer teams up with Peter Loewen and the University of Toronto’s Policy, Elections and Representation Lab (PEARL) to explore the theory that a “perception gap” exists between those who live in cities, the suburbs and rural communities. How do Canadians' distorted beliefs of one another’s circumstances fuel polarization?

Where seasonal work is more common, what kind of EI reform would both protect workers and help create prosperous local labour markets? This paper explores six options focused on Atlantic Canada, arguing that widespread use of EI by seasonal workers makes it seem there's more unemployed workers than is really the case – a distortion that negatively impacts the economic potential of the region.

An urban-rural scan of potential long-term effects of the future of work shows the negative effects of a displaced workforce will be felt disproportionately among rural residents, who make up the majority of high-risk employment sectors that will succumb to technology-induced disruption. Understanding how these changes could affect urban centres vs. rural areas is a crucial ingredient to long-term policymaking and key to creating an effective place-based policy agenda for Canada to manage those disruptions and keep an urban-rural economic divide that already exists from growing

Over the past year, PPF's Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow, Sean Speer has been exploring urban and rural differences in Canada and how policymakers, business and community leaders, and the public can work to bridge the growing cultural, political and socio-economic characteristics of the urban-rural divide.

The economic gap between urban and rural places in Canada is significant and we cannot afford to let distressed communities come to the view that they don’t matter. PPF’s Prime Ministers of Canada fellow Sean Speer stresses the importance of cultivating a shared understanding of urban and rural cultures, and will travel across the nation in order to formulate a policy agenda that can bridge the urban-rural divide.