Urban

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?

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?

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.