Immigrants could prosper in Canada’s towns

‘Carrots’ could boost numbers living in small cities, writes Douglas Todd.

“Canada is a big country,” the websites of immigration consultants say.

True, Canada covers almost 10 million square kilometres. It’s second in geographic size only to Russia. Its forests, grasslands, mountains, rock and tundra stretch as far as the eye can see.

But when it comes to human choices, Canada is not big at all: The vast majority of the country’s residents live in congestion on a tiny sliver of the country’s land mass, typically near the U.S. border.

Broad swaths of Canada’s hinterland, the small towns and rural areas beyond urban centres, are losing people, despite Canada having the fastest growth and immigration rates among the Group of Eight industrialized countries.

Only one in 40 immigrants lives in small town or rural Canada, compared to one in five who are born in the country.

Canada has more than seven million foreign-born residents out of a total population of 35 million. They account for two-thirds of the country’s growth.

But almost three in four newcomers move to just three cities: Toronto, Montreal and Metro Vancouver.

Canadian statisticians call the country’s large and medium cities “sinkholes,” since almost everyone drains into them.

The sinkhole effect exerts intense pressure on housing and rental costs, transit, higher education, traffic congestion, noise and social services in large cities.

While big cities grow because of migration, the opposite is happening to small cities, such as Quesnel, B.C., Saint John, N.B., and Timmins, Ont.

Can anything be done to revive Canada’s hinterland, while relieving the squeeze on Canada’s urban centres and their suburbs, including those of fast-growing Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa?

Apparently oblivious to Canadian studies that show immigrants do better financially if they stay away from the country’s big cities, most observers claim there is no way to change the “inevitable” flow to urban centres.

Such commentators not only bow to laissez-faire economics to make their case, they point to how Section 6 of Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights provides “mobility rights” to all citizens.

It would be hard to require anyone in Canada, including permanent residents and immigrants, to move to rural regions, or even smaller cities.

But what about offering “carrots” of encouragement?

It’s been done before. From the 1870s to the 1930s, Ottawa offered free land to immigrants and refugees, much of it on the Prairies or in B.C.

What about fine-tuning Canada’s immigrant point system — which favours those with high educational and skill levels — to grant extra points to newcomers who settle in Canada’s hinterlands?

That’s a suggestion from Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who frequently advises the federal government.

A points system that favours permanent residents who have shown (in part through their income-tax statements) that they are committed to making a life in Quesnel, Timmins or

Saint John could do a lot for those cities. The small cities’ schools would fill and their housing and retail markets would strengthen.

Citizenship court judges dealing with people who are applying to be accepted as immigrants on compassionate grounds, Kurland adds, have also been known to treat favourably migrants who live in small towns.

The carrot approach would not only breathe new life into the hinterlands, it would give a leg up to immigrants themselves.

A little-known Statistics Canada study by Andre Bernard found that most immigrants who settle in Canada’s small towns do better financially than the majority who choose Canada’s 13 largest cities.

His report, Immigrants in the Hinterland, found newcomers who move to small towns and rural areas not only more quickly learn an official language, they soon earn more than other immigrants and those born in Canada.

That not only benefits the immigrants and their children, it does the same for our increasingly struggling small towns.