Inter-regional Migration To Canada’s Resource Peripheries
The Future Of Work & Inter-regional Migration To Canada’s Resource Peripheries
Principal Investigator: Suzanne Mills (McMaster University)
Co-Investigators: Katrine Mazer (Acadia University), Michael Haan (Western University)
Research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Over the past ten years there has been a notable shift in population movements within Canada. For generations, Canada’s population has been growing increasingly urban. This has been driven in part by internal migration, in other words migration within Canada.
Drawn by economic growth and job opportunities, people have moved from rural and peripheral areas to more urban, central, and rapidly growing regions.
As a result, while the country as a whole was growing, in some regions population growth was growing much more slowly, stagnating or even declining. But in recent years, an increasing number of people have been moving away from more populated regions to regions that were previously growing slowly or not at all.
The Covid-19 pandemic amplified this trend, which started in 2015/2016. News reports have suggested that shifts in personal priorities, affordability crises in larger centres and the rapid adoption of remote popularized the idea of moving to smaller, more rural, and relatively affordable places.
After decades of population decline, many rural and peripheral places in Canada were recast in the media as desirable places to live, that offered affordability, access to nature, a slower pace of life and ultimately, the ability to centre ‘life’ over work. In many cases, places that had seen decades of population decline began to grow again. This trend was prevalent across Canada and globally.
While this surprising trend was widely reported in the media, we knew little about who was moving to slower-growth regions and why, how migrants were making a living and integrating socially, and how receiving communities were experiencing this unexpected influx of new residents.
We set out to answer these questions by examining examining two regions that were popular destinations for inter-regional migration during the Covid-19 pandemic: the Maritimes and and Northern Ontario.
