Project
Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide in Canada
Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow Project
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Read the Latest
- Ep.39: Are Rural Areas Being Left Behind? – Catch Sean Speer and Peter Loewen on Policy Speaking
- Perceptions and reality across Canada’s urban-rural divide, op-ed in Policy Options
- Perceptions and Polarization: Measuring the Perception Gap between Urban and Rural Canadians
- Fault Lines and Common Ground: Understanding the state of the Urban-Rural Divide in Canada
Coming up
- Policy recommendations on bridging the urban-rural divide – Coming soon
About the project
Over the past year, PPF’s Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow Sean Speer has undertaken an exploration of urban and rural differences in Canada and how policymakers, business and community leaders, and the public can work to bridge this growing cultural, political and socio-economic divide. In collaboration with the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the University of Toronto, Sean is conducting quantitative analysis to understand the perceptions Canadians have of one another across geographical lines and breaking down the realities of the urban-rural divide. Two upcoming reports will showcase his findings, and the implications for Canadian policy makers, leaders, and communities.
Sean is Fellow in Residence at PPF and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. During his fellowship, his research has focused on the cultural, economic, and social tensions between urban and rural Canadians, and the potential effects on our politics and society.
For more information, contact: Andrée Loucks, Policy Lead
About the fellowship
Announced in 2012 at PPF’s 25th Testimonial Dinner, the Prime Ministers of Canada Fellowship brings prominent Canadian leaders to PPF to conduct research and convene dialogues about public policy, democratic institutions and good governance. The fellowship is supported financially by the RBC Foundation. Karen Restoule, Kent Aitken, Madelaine Drohan and Peter MacKinnon are previous Prime Ministers of Canada Fellows.
Reports
Fault Lines and Common Ground
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.
Perceptions and Polarization
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?
Articles
Speer: Is Canadian politics shaped by “the revenge of places that don’t matter”?
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.
Announcing PPF’s 2019 Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow
PPF’s 2019 Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow Sean Speer to study urban-rural divide.
