Introduction
Often defined by low population density and large geographic distances, rural and smaller communities in Canada are currently characterized by declining and aging populations, outmigration and limited and diminishing access to services and public infrastructure (Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF), 2015; 2021; 2024). Despite the diversity of rural Canada, these challenges or “problems” persist, to varying extents, across the country. The consistent failures of rural development policies and programs (including attempts to integrate, settle and retain migrantsFootnote 1 ) to revitalize rural spaces are often grounded in the perceived deficits of rurality itself (Blake and Nurse, Reference Blake, Nurse, Blake and Nurse2003; Engelmann and Schwartz, Reference Engelmann and Schwartz1975; Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010). However, this construction of rurality is fundamentally problematic, as both deficits and assets exist across life in rural and urban spaces. Thus, the inherent problem cannot be the dynamics of distance, diversity and density that define rurality.
In this context, we ask: Why has the development and revitalization of rural places not progressed in Canada? What are we missing? While past research demonstrated that rural areas, their resources and labour supply are integral to the Canadian economy and to life in urban spaces, why and how does Canada remain embedded in the “urban policy” trap? What characterizes the “urban policy trap,” and how does Canada continue to be rooted in this perpetual dynamic? In response, we argue that the use of critical historical institutionalism moves us away from the construction of the rural “problem” as fundamentally embedded in the rural versus urban paradigm.
While state-based institutions are a prominent focus of historical institutionalism, institutions can be broadly conceptualized as “the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity or political economy” which distribute power unevenly across social groups and influence the behaviour and actions of individuals (Hall and Taylor, Reference Hall and Taylor1996: 938). By situating historical institutionalism within postcolonial politics and critical, political economic theory (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020; Reference Markey, Halseth and Manson2008; Reference Markey, Gunton, Kelly, Pagani and Reimer2023), we demonstrate that the rural–urban policy dialectic is a political construction that is both symptomatic of the Canadian colonial and extractive political economy and casual in that it facilitates and reinforces the distinction between rural problems and urban solutions. This form of policy inertia perpetuates the marginalization of rural spaces and peoples while simultaneously privileging the economic and political structures that have always benefited from that marginalization (urban spaces and populations in both Canadian and international spheres).
To demonstrate this thesis, we examine the current context of rural migration as a case study of the institutional dynamics and path dependencies creating this policy inertia. We show how the policy problem is not rurality; rather, both politics and policy default to the status quo, the policy bias of the rural–urban dichotomy and the political economy of the Canadian state, rather than re-examining the dynamics and causes that create that symptom. Our analysis demonstrates that, even though rural migration and policy are characterized by social and economic assets and liabilities, these policies are embedded within the historical and institutionalized path dependencies that have defined rural policy in Canada. As noted above, those definitions include low populations, extractive functionality and both social and economic peripheries that service urban cores.
The movement of migrants into rural spaces is historically limited, politicized both practically and rhetorically and in some cases, completely erased in service of both historical and contemporary institutional demands. As a result, even though there is a long history of migrants settling and working in rural Canada, the broader paradigm is grounded in positive economic and political rhetorics of growth and diversification. Migration patterns, and the use of migration as a developmental tool, remains largely defined by policy inertia and historical path dependencies—these dependencies are particularly amplified in the case of temporary foreign migrant workers.
The settlement and integration challenges that contemporary migrants face in rural places are part of entrenched historical patterns that cannot be, and indeed are not intended to be, solved or managed through one policy initiative or pilot program that attempts to attract and retain newcomers in rural places. Instead, we argue that the issues commonly identified as “migration problems” are not actually isolated to the migrant population—rather, they should be interpreted as symptomatic of the broader nature of rural policy design and construction of the “rural problematique.” We use this term to refer to the aggregated framing of rurality as a policy problem to be solved that exists in contrast to the benefits and solutions of urbanization. In conclusion, we explain how the framework of the “rural problematique” supports and maintains both political and economic status quo and results in minimal disruption to the existing systems (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020; Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010).
Background: Critical Historical Institutionalism
Historical institutionalism examines the development of institutions across time and space, and is concerned with the ways in which institutions emerge and endure over time within a broader social and political context (Thelen, Reference Thelen1999: 382). While this approach has been applied widely in political science and policy studies, it is particularly well suited to: (1) conceptualize policy continuity over time within states as well as policy variation between states, (2) account for the role of political actors as both “objects and as agents of history” and (3) explain institutional stability and resiliency (Thelen and Steinmo, Reference Thelen, Steinmo, Thelen, Steinmo and Longstreth1992: 10).
One of the key benefits of historical institutionalism is as a method of explaining the self-reinforcing dynamics that help institutions endure over time and constrict the possibilities of change. Formal institutions and public policies are designed to be resistant to change and difficult to overturn (Pierson, Reference Pierson2000: 262). This is partly due to the concept of path dependency, “in which preceding steps in a particular direction induce further movement in the same direction,” due to an “increasing returns process” where “the probability of further steps along the same path increases with each moved down the path… because the relative benefits of the current activity compared with other possible options increase over time” (Pierson, Reference Pierson2000: 252).
As we argue below, institutional stability is neither apolitical nor neutral, as the status quo is actively maintained by those who hold power and are invested in existing institutional structures and systems (Hall, Reference Hall, Fioretos, Falleti and Sheingate2016). Historical institutionalism can help make visible these power dynamics and the ways in which institutions “reflect, and also reproduce and magnify, particular patterns of power distribution in politics…[as] political arrangements and policy feedbacks actively facilitate the organization and empowerment of certain groups while actively disarticulating and marginalizing others” (Thelen, Reference Thelen1999: 394; Skocpol, Reference Skocpol1992). Over time, sustained positive feedback and the maintenance of the status quo reinforces, increases and normalizes these power asymmetries, making it more and more difficult to challenge or change them (Pierson, Reference Pierson2000: 259).
Historical institutionalism contends that, while institutional change is possible and policy paradigms can and do shift, change is relational, as it is shaped by the political and cultural context, and constrained by past patterns and trajectories (Thelen, Reference Thelen1999). Institutionalism, therefore, emphasizes the endurance of structures over individuals, who come and go within institutional arrangements. Institutions shape individuals more than individuals change institutions, thus making change difficult (Hoefer, Reference Hoefer2022). However, possibilities for institutional change or evolution can open up if the “ideational and material foundations” of institutions are disrupted. Similarly, Thelen contends that “understanding moments in which fundamental political change is possible requires an analysis of the particular mechanisms through which the previous patterns were sustained and reproduced” (Reference Thelen1999: 399).
In this article, we utilize historical institutionalism to broadly map the historical policy trajectories and uncover the foundational mechanisms of the rural–urban divide in Canada. Historical institutionalism helps us understand how and why the rural–urban divide has persisted in Canadian policy making and institutions, why it has been so difficult to change and why policy inertia (in the form of failed rural development initiatives) persists.
In our analysis we account for the various power dynamics at play, who is invested in these institutional arrangements and why, how that investment is sustained and perpetuated over time, and how those who do not benefit from such arrangements remain marginalized. Addressing these questions helps us understand how institutional arrangements and processes continue to be reproduced (Thelen, Reference Thelen1999: 391) and how particular political actors and groups avoid institutional change that would threaten their position and the power that they hold (Pierson, Reference Pierson2000; Hall, Reference Hall, Fioretos, Falleti and Sheingate2016).
Historical institutionalism has been critiqued for failing to fully engage with the broader social factors and contexts that influence why institutions exist and operate in the ways that they do (Pilon, Reference Pilon2021: 102). Importantly, critical approaches help explain how inequalities, systems of oppression and power relations manifest through institutions and institutional processes (Caballero, Reference Caballero2025; Mackay et al., Reference Mackay, Kenny and Chappell2010; Pilon, Reference Pilon2021). Scholars have suggested that adding more critical social theories such as feminism, constructivism, critical race theory, Marxism and postcolonialism to historical institutional analyses would help counter the positivist or empirical focus of much of historical institutionalism and engage more deeply with the social and relational contexts in which institutions are formed and operate. Overall, a critical approach to historical institutionalism, which we employ in our analysis below, contends that institutions are “fundamentally composed of relational social struggles” and “are both structured by and help to structure such unequal social relations” (Pilon, Reference Pilon2021: 111; Cleaver and de Koning, Reference Cleaver and de Koning2015; Maher and Aquanno, Reference Maher and Aquanno2018).
In complement to our institutional analysis, we aspire to explain the social relations and power dynamics that play a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the Canadian settler state and institutional arrangements. Specifically, the broader context of settler colonialism and conquest on which the Canadian political state was built and continues to be reproduced through processes such as citizenship and migration is central to our analysis. Taking a page from Lowi (Reference Lowi1972), we note that policy challenges such as migration are not simply the “outputs” of the state; rather, they both reflect and have guided the country’s colonial pathways, which have in turn fundamentally shaped, and continue to impact, the construction of the state, its institutions and political economy and, as we argue below, the persistence of the “rural problematique.”
The Construction of the “Rural Problematique” in Canada
Today, the “problem” of the rural is largely understood as an inherent set of challenges that come with life outside of urban centres where population density is lower and geographic distances are greater. Defining rural Canada is a long and debated process that has political and economic consequences (Parkins and Reed, Reference Parkins and Reed2013), including fiscal policy, identity politics, developmental trajectories and even individualized and familial effects (Knuttila, 2023). To policy makers, rurality is defined by population density and the distances between places. These definitions are used to deliver on economic and service mandates and determine where public funds are spent (Statistics Canada, 2017; Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010).
This way of defining rurality presents a number of issues: statistical definitions are not only inconsistent but very narrow and do not represent the diversity of rural Canada, which includes, but is not limited to, agricultural regions, fishing towns, northern and remote communities, hamlets, villages and small to midsized cities. Many rural scholars have argued that rurality is socially constructed and reflects a certain history, local knowledge, relationality and identity that cannot be captured in a two-dimensional, statistical definition (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a; Massey, Reference Massey2005; Woods, Reference Woods2011; Parkins and Reed, Reference Parkins and Reed2013; Markey et al., Reference Markey, Gunton, Kelly, Pagani and Reimer2023). Similarly, other scholars have argued that there is a persistent urban bias in public policy making and funding and research (Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010; O’Connell, Reference O’Connell2010).
Regardless of the empirical definition, the defining characteristic of rural and smaller communities in Canada remains the assumption that numerous systemic challenges are present in these spaces. The contemporary challenges associated with a lack of infrastructure and public funds, declining and aging populations, youth outmigration, and disappearing services characterize the majority of, and have become synonymous with, rural places across the country (Blake and Nurse, Reference Blake, Nurse, Blake and Nurse2003; Moazzami, Reference Moazzami2015; CRRF, 2021; Hallstrom, Reference Hallstrom2018; Gadsby and Samson, Reference Gadsby and Samson2016; Skinner and Hanlon, Reference Skinner and Hanlon2016). While the severity of these issues varies depending on factors such as the local economy, geographical location, population size and demography, these issues are overwhelmingly present in the spaces outside of Canada’s biggest cities (CRRF, 2015; 2021; 2024). In contrast to such methodological debates and with the aim of demonstrating how such debates are actually symptomatic of a larger false dichotomization, we employ a broader understanding of rurality in our analysis. Specifically, we note that such debates are grounded in urbanormativity (Thomas et al., Reference Thomas, Lowe, Fulkerson and Smith2011) and reflect, rather than resolve, the “rural problematique.”
Despite recognizing, at least rhetorically, the important economic, social and cultural contributions of rural Canada (Jean, Reference Jean, Blake and Nurse2003), a comprehensive national vision of rural Canada or prioritization of rural issues as anything other than agriculture has been glaringly absent. The current rural portfolio in Canadian public policy making has been described as “existing in a state of incoherence” (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Gunton, Kelly, Pagani and Reimer2023: 71). While numerous attempts have been made to address these challenges and revitalize rural Canada through public policies that focus on issues such as increasing productivity in farming and fishing, encouraging industrialization and manufacturing and developing local capacity and social capital, such programs have largely failed and “did not come anywhere close to solving the problem of rural Canada or of fostering the development of rural Canada” (Blake, Reference Blake2003: 204).
Part of the issue is that current policy discourse assumes that rural decline is an inevitable process, driven by globalization and urbanization, which in turn have necessitated the ever increasing focus of governments and public policy on big cities and the people that live there (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth and Manson2008). While the majority of Canadians lived in a rural place around the time of Confederation and into the early 1900s, after the Second World War more and more people moved to the cities, and Canada changed from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized one. By 1961, 71 per cent of Canadians lived in an urban centre where industry, wealth and politics were concentrated (Engelmann and Schwartz, Reference Engelmann and Schwartz1975; Statistics Canada, 2024). Today, over 80 per cent of Canadians live in an urban place (Statistics Canada, 2024).
Urbanization patterns alone do not account for the retreat of the state from rural places and the persistence of the “rural problematique.” During the period after the Second World War, as urbanization was growing, the adoption of a Keynesian policy framework (fiscal federalism) by the Canadian government resulted in an increase in public policy investments in rural spaces. The increase in productive capacity seen during the war and the growing demand for consumer goods post-1945 required an increasing supply of natural resources and energy inputs. Fulfilling this demand required state investment in existing natural resource projects and developing new points of access to supplies in more remote regions. The Canadian state invested in critical infrastructure in rural places such as hospitals and schools and in transportation networks to support industrial resource development at a global scale (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020).
However, this investment did not continue, as starting in the 1970s, the postwar boom was challenged by deficit budgets, the growth of national debt and the global economic recession in the early 1980s. Governments began adopting an alternative, market-focused framework which had specific consequences for rural places. The adoption of a neoliberal public policy framework resulted in government disinvestment from rural Canada, as public funding became increasingly seen as an expense that needed to be paid off within a certain time frame, rather than as an investment in the future. Additionally, the implementation of an “urban-modeled market-based, metric for the evaluation of service efficiencies” resulted in the regionalization or closure of services in rural places where smaller populations and greater distances deemed the delivery of government services too inefficient (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020: 117–18; Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010).
In the current neoliberal context, the continued withdrawal of the state, the negative impacts of repeated cycles of economic boom and bust in local economies based on single, resource-based industries and the erosion of critical infrastructure and services have left rural places with a reduced and limited capacity to respond to social, economic and environmental change (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Gunton, Kelly, Pagani and Reimer2023: 71; Van Assche et al., Reference Assche, Kristof, Gruezmacher, Summers, Lavoie, Jones, Granzow, Hallstrom and Parkins2017). In the absence of government interventions, there has been an increase in outside, nongovernmental, sometimes foreign investment in rural spaces in a “ruthlessly extractive economy,” (Epp, Reference Epp2008: 49), which has resulted in significant environmental degradation with the establishment of corporate agriculture, urban landfills, massive hog barns, coal mines, low-wage manufacturing and, if the region is pretty enough, golf courses, acreage developments and tourist resorts across the rural landscape. Evidence suggests that the infrastructural, revenue and environmental concerns present in rural spaces have been, and will continue to be, compounded by the global reality of climate change and international economic pressures (Hallstrom et al., Reference Hallstrom, White and Dolan2012).
Today, calls for rural revitalization often demand that governments re-invest in rural Canada through coordinated policy strategies, public funding and investments in critical infrastructure (CRRF, 2024). However, we argue that, even if governments were interested in re-investing in rural spaces, these investments are unlikely to revitalize rural Canada or “resolve” the rural–urban divide, primarily because they would continue to be grounded in the extractive logic of the settler state.
While government investments in rural Canada in the post-Second World War era developed critical infrastructure in rural spaces, this investment also had significant negative long-term consequences, as it “acted to cement single-industry dependence into many rural and small-town places—a dependence that has been difficult to shake” (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020: 117; Halseth, Reference Halseth2017). Government investments were focused on reducing the costs of distance in getting resource commodities to market and supporting workforces and businesses involved in this endeavour (Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth, Ryser, Vittuari, Devlin, Pagani and Thomas2020: 117). Because of this, many regions became reliant on one industry, such as mining or oil and gas extraction, as examples, and the livelihoods of the people living there became contingent on the prices of such commodities on the international market (Skinner and Hanlon, Reference Skinner and Hanlon2016). In other words, the social and economic structures of rural Canada became “fixed” and institutionalized, rather than adaptive or responsive.
While these forces may be exacerbated by a neoliberal policy environment, they were not created by such an environment and cannot be solved by a re-investment of government in rural spaces because the logic behind the settler colonial state’s relationship with rural spaces remains the same. Regardless of the governmental approach to public policy, the logics of the settler state—grounded in the institutional consolidation of rural–urban differentiation—continue in the same ways. If government investment follows the same colonial, capitalist and extractive logics, then change is not possible, because the conceptual and material foundations on which the Canadian state and its institutions were founded have not been disrupted.
Since the creation of so-called Canada, resources and opportunities have been unevenly distributed across social groups and geographic areas, “according to the logic and demands of historically specific phases of capitalist accumulation” (Brodie, Reference Brodie1990: 73). The economic development policies of the Canadian settler state were intentionally designed in the interests of urban centres where the dominant class, political power and modernity were located (Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005). Over time, the impact of such uneven policies created “an industrialized center” and rural exporting “hinterlands” (Brodie, Reference Brodie1990: 118; Knuttila, Reference Knuttila2023). Rural struggle, depopulation and decline are thus the result of the historical and ongoing reliance of the capitalist state on extractive industries, as the state’s development agenda “explicitly assumes (and even relies on) rural exploitation” (Ashwood, Reference Ashwood2018: 719).
The Dominion Land Survey project in western Canada
In the rest of this section, we demonstrate how uneven rural–urban development is a political creation of the Canadian state through an examination of one of Canada’s first and most significant colonial projects, the “emptying” of the prairies and the Dominion Land Survey project (Daschuk, Reference Daschuk2014; Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005). While the dynamics of the rural–urban divide are present across the country and are not unique to the west, we focus here on the enactment of the Dominion Lands Act (1871) and surveying of western Canada as one example of how rural–urban relations were constructed in Canada. This example demonstrates the logics behind the political creation of the rural–urban divide and how these logics have persisted across time and space.
Every settler colonial project requires land, and the Dominion Survey facilitated an accounting of the rural west by physically changing the prairie landscape (Harris, Reference Harris2020; Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005). Under the Dominion Lands Act of 1871, local agents of the Canadian state ploughed the earth and engraved a Cartesian grid upon the land (McKercher and Wolfe, Reference McKercher and Wolfe1986; Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005). More than a physical manifestation, the legal grid (Figure 1 below) was “a project of colonial governance that defined social and class relationship and sought to guarantee the very natures of prairie inhabitants as ‘private individuals,’ as well as… gendered and raced subjects” (Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005: 5; Brglez, Reference Brglez2021).
The Grid.
This colonial project set the groundwork for the economic, social and cultural relations that defined, and continue to characterize, rural Canada and ultimately helped define the (intentional, and thus unsolvable) “rural problem.” The establishment of government procedures such as map creation, the land survey and individual title and document registration consolidated the power of the Canadian state. Surveyors reorientated land that was once common to private property, a process needed for settlers to participate in a market economy and the establishment of industrial capitalism (Brglez Reference Brglez2021; Harris, Reference Harris2020; Ruck, Reference Ruck2024).
Ensuring the physical permanence of the legal grid and the discursive individualistic, white, capitalistic ambitions of the Canadian state required settlers (Knuttila, Reference Knuttila2023). Canadian legislators knew that the establishment of white, and ideally Anglo-Saxon, settlers in the prairies hinged upon the creation of this space as “empty” (Starblanket and Hunt, Reference Starblanket and Hunt2020) and therefore primed for colonial population. Prior to the planning of an agrarian economy on the Canadian plains, Indigenous peoples had been participating in the commercial fur economy for at least 200 years. Their participation in these activities drastically shaped Indigenous life in the west, as “along with the invisible hand of the marketplace came unseen microbes that brought unprecedented sickness and death to the region” (Daschuk, Reference Daschuk2014: xi).
In addition to the devastation that diseases such as smallpox inflicted on Indigenous peoples, the acquisition of the west by the Dominion of Canada in 1869 brought unprecedented change for Indigenous inhabitants through deliberate state-building. Despite treaty obligations, the disappearance of the bison and pending arrival of European settlers left First Nations in a desperate situation (Daschuk, Reference Daschuk2014: 79; Brglez, Reference Brglez2021). Starvation was used by the Canadian government to force any remaining Indigenous populations onto reserves, and the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway from coast to coast was finalized by 1885. Combined with health threats such as tuberculosis and the “completion” of the reserve system by 1883, western Canada was now “open” for population and economic consolidation (Daschuk, Reference Daschuk2014: 128; Starblanket and Hunt, Reference Starblanket and Hunt2020; MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2019).
With Indigenous populations confined to reserves and away from fertile lands and valuable natural resources, European settlers began to arrive in the late nineteenth Century (MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2019). The idealized state imaginary of permanent immigrant settlement in the west was based on racialized logics that prioritized Anglo-Saxon newcomers from Europe and the USA. Immigration campaigns targeted populations that would fit into this narrative of a “civilized,” heteronormative, culturally “white” and hardworking vision of the prairie west, built on capitalist logics and a construction of the prairies as a “vacant” land that needed to be conquered (Starblanket and Hunt, Reference Starblanket and Hunt2020: 24).
However, desired Anglo-Saxon immigrants (notably from Scandinavia, Germany and Britian (Starblanket and Hunt, Reference Starblanket and Hunt2020: 24)) were often reluctant to relocate to the Canadian wilderness, and immigration agents had more success enticing settlers from Eastern Europe, such as Mennonites, Doukhobors and Hutterites. These peoples largely rejected the constraints of the individual settlement system, and demanded to be located in “contiguous ‘blocks,’ as well as in residentially compact agricultural villages” (Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005: 28). While special provisions were allowed, as a temporary solution, the Canadian government made it clear that this was neither the ideal nor the plan, as the establishment of collective spaces such as villages presented a political liability for policy makers.
Beyond a racial identifier, “whiteness” was explicitly, socially constructed in rural spaces as a way to establish individualism and self-reliance, white supremacy and a competitive market economy (Starblanket and Hunt, Reference Starblanket and Hunt2020). The Canadian state intentionally racialized western geographies through the construction of whiteness as a way to establish its extractive, capitalist project and discourage socialist notions of common property, thus setting the state upon the pathway to both territorial and institutional consolidation.
This colonial history demonstrates the explicit construction of rurality (both physically and discursively) as a white, empty frontier to be occupied and exploited for the benefit of the Canadian state. The logics of this colonial past continue into the present. Across Canada, settler identity continues to be synonymous with “whiteness,” which not only obscures racial difference across time and space but limits our critical understanding of the relationships between race and power and the varied, precarious experiences of racialized migrants with processes of citizenship and inclusion (Fung, Reference Fung2021: 116–8). While non-white migrants have a long history in Canada, their presence has been “diminished by political and social pressures and overt discrimination that led to the numerical restriction and spatial segregation of these groups” (Herman, Reference Herman2017: 45). One example of this is the well-documented erasure of Black history in both official accounts and national imaginaries of state-making.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black communities settled across rural Canada (Vernon, Reference Vernon2004; McKittrick, Reference McKittrick2002; Wolters, Reference Wolters2015; Mundende, Reference Mundende1998; Fung, Reference Fung2021). For example, Black farmers and their families settled in the Athabasca region in Alberta, where the all-Black communities of Amber Valley and Keystone were established, and in Maidstone in Saskatchewan and in the Big Woody District in Manitoba. However, this immigration did not align with the federal government’s ideal of the white prairie, was curtailed in 1911, and unofficially prohibited by 1914 (Schultz, Reference Schultz1982; Vernon, Reference Vernon2004).
While Black immigrants remained in the prairies and focused on building their communities, often away from white settlers who were hostile to their presence, they were largely made invisible. Vernon (Reference Vernon2004: 69) describes how, in 1929, “an acting Deputy Minister for Immigration reported, mistakenly, that none of the original black settlers remained in the west, it seemed that nearly everyone had forgotten them.” Despite this continued erasure of Black settlers, Vernon contends that:
the first influx of settlers in the early part of the century endured, and after 1955 the black population on the prairies both increased and diversified (when restrictions on West Indian immigration began to be relaxed) with new arrivants from the Caribbean, Africa, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. That this history has been largely repressed in the prairie imaginary makes black spaces on the prairies feel like fraught, un-home-like places. (Reference Vernon2004: 69)
Black settlement was not exclusive to the west. On the other side of the country, Black settlers arrived in the early nineteenth century and settled in Grey County, on the Old Durham Road and in the Chatham Kent region of Southwestern Ontario (Fung, Reference Fung2021; Norquay and Garramone, Reference Norquay and Garramone2016). While these are only a few examples of early Black settlement in Canada, this history challenges the norm of the white settler and demonstrates the presence of racial diversity in rural Canada.
Despite this history, white Europeans are still framed to be the original occupants of Turtle Island. This narrative continues to be part of the national imaginary and is perpetuated in education systems, academia, policy and broader cultural and social conceptions of space. Canadian curricula and history books maintain the rural white settler narrative, reaffirm white and urban normativity and, in the process, erase non-white settlers, their communities and histories (Norquay and Garramone, Reference Norquay and Garramone2016: 22; Forcione et al., Reference Forcione, Lamb, Buitenhuis and Godlewska2023). O’Connell contends that:
Representations of rural spaces in Canadian history books, literature, fine art, and popular culture that naturalize a homogenous innocent white rural past perpetuate frontier narratives… The vast Canadian landscape of prairie lands, northern wilderness, stretches of mountains and the hardscrabble existence of farming, fishing, forestry and mining combine in the popular imagination to bind white settlers to tough rural spaces devoid of racialized settlers and Indigenous populations, who, so the narrative goes, were dying out anyway… rural spaces are also portrayed as locations that have been left behind in the drive to build diversified global economies and cultures. In spite of the existence of a range of ethnic groups, rural white communities feel as though they have little knowledge or experiences around dealing with diversities. (Reference O’Connell2010: 542)
Academic, media and policy narratives of rural Canada as “backward” and “intolerant” stand in stark contrast to the multicultural, thriving and progressive images of urban Canada (Cairns Reference Cairns2013, 624; Corbett, Reference Corbett2006). While urban Canada is more ethnically diverse than rural spaces, largely due to international migration patterns shaped by national legislation, all space is actively created, and there are political, social and economic reasons behind the construction of urban spaces as ethnically diverse and multicultural and rural space as “more white and less tolerant” (O’Connell, Reference O’Connell2010: 537; Keyes and Aguiar, Reference Keyes and Aguiar2021).
For example, Canada’s discriminatory immigration legislation played a significant role in the racial profile of the country. While the majority of “non-Euro-ethnic” immigrants arrived in the country after the creation of the Universal Points System in 1967, overt racist erasures of marginalized populations, such as Chinese populations, also “helped to establish the belief that all non-white, non-Indigenous residents are recent immigrants to Canada” (Herman, Reference Herman2017: 45; Peake and Ray, Reference Peake and Ray2001). This ongoing, and pervasive, narrative upholds whiteness as a racial category but also as a social construct associated with individuality, heteronormativity and capitalist logics. Additionally, the focus on rural racism and intolerance obscures the need to address racist narratives and white supremacy across all of Canadian society and in all spaces, including the urban (Cairns, Reference Cairns2013: 642; Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a: 9; Lund and Hira-Friesen, Reference Lund and Hira-Friesen2013).
Assuming and naturalizing whiteness in rural space re-enacts colonial narratives and ignores the diversity of populations, different ways of being and complexity of race relations present both historically and today in rural places. Academic debates have also contributed to this narrative. Academia has been critiqued for its portrayal and engagement with rurality, specifically within rural studies, as “white,” culturally homogeneous spaces (Panelli et al., Reference Panelli, Hubbard, Coombes and Suchet-Pearson2009; Herman, Reference Herman2017: 47).
For example, in academia, the commonly used term “New Immigration Destinations” (NID) references the study of “new” patterns of international migration to rural places in the Global North (Pottie-Sherman and Graham, Reference Pottie-Sherman and Graham2021; Haandrikman et al., Reference Haandrikman, Hedberg and Kenji Chihaya2024; McAreavey and Argent, Reference McAreavey and Argent2018). This term has been criticized for obscuring the presence of Indigenous peoples in rural spaces in settler colonial states and ignoring historic, often hidden, patterns of migration and racial diversity (Woods, Reference Woods2022: 316). These narratives naturalize rural spaces as white and fail to address how the state has constructed rural space through colonial logics and legislation (O’Connell, Reference O’Connell2010: 542–43). The colonial construction of rural spaces as white, empty and problematic is a critical path dependency that reinforces the policy framing of rural as the negative antonym to the urban normal. As a case study to further demonstrate this dynamic, in the following section we examine how the contemporary policy issues presented by the rural migrant demonstrate the “rural problematique” and how social and geographic contexts can change, but the outcomes remain the same as a result of institutional constraints on policy innovation.
A Contemporary Policy Problem: The Migrant in Rural Canada
As an institutionalized policy response that is largely focused on filling gaps in Canada’s labour market and addressing depopulation in specific provinces and regions, contemporary migration pathways focus on the economic role for newcomers across the country (Carter et al., Reference Carter, Morrish and Amoyaw2008; Krahn et al., Reference Krahn, Derwing and Abu-Laban2005; Government of Canada, 2024a). In Canadian public policy, “persons who are, or who have ever been, landed immigrants or permanent residents are ‘immigrants’, while those who have work or study or temporary resident permits, or who have claimed refugee status (asylum claimants) are ‘non-permanent residents’” (Statistics Canada, 2023). In both cases, newcomers are largely treated as labour substitutes, as sources of economic capital, rather than as individuals that bring a broad combination of human, political, social and other capitals (Flora and Flora, Reference Flora and Flora2013) to the communities and regions in which they settle.
While the majority of newcomers are destined for urban centres, this has been changing in recent decades owing to specific programs, such as the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP) (Government of Canada, 2024a), and policies, such as Provincial Nominee Programs (PNP) (Carter et al., Reference Carter, Morrish and Amoyaw2008; Picot et al., Reference Picot, Hou and Crossman2023), that are designed to spread the economic benefits of migration across the country and continue the regionalization and dispersal efforts of the federal and provincial governments that began with, and were integral to, the creation of the Canadian state (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2023; Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a; Bantjes, Reference Bantjes2005). For example, “while Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver continue to welcome the most immigrants, the share of immigrants settling in these three cities has started to decline, falling from approximately 73–75% in the 1990s and early 2000s, to 56% in 2016 and 53.4% in 2021” (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a: 2). The more recent expansion of temporary worker programs, discussed in detail below, have also contributed to an increasing number of contemporary migrants arriving in rural spaces (Statistics Canada, 2022).
The state of migration in Canada: Temporary migrant labour
One significant result of the focus of the Canadian Government on international migration as an economic project has been the recent and dramatic increase in the use of temporary foreign worker programs. Introduced in the 1950s, temporary foreign worker programs were designed to supplement Canada’s economy and fill bounded gaps in the labour market. Since their introduction, the structure of the various programs in Canada has changed significantly (Roberts, Reference Roberts2020). The complexities of migrant worker pathways, and the requirements and specifics of each program, have been critiqued for being increasingly difficult to navigate. Additionally, the varying categories of temporary labour make it challenging to track and compare the number of people coming through the numerous programs over time (Carlaw, Reference Carlaw2021: 339–40; Canadian Senate, 2024).
Since 2010, the number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in Canada has more than tripled (Akbar, Reference Akbar2022). For the first time in the country’s history, in 2007 and again in 2008 Canada welcomed more temporary migrants than permanent residents (Nakache and Kinoshita, Reference Nakache and Kinoshita2010; Stasiulis, Reference Stasiulis2020). “Between 2002 and 2008, the number of temporary foreign workers present in Canada (on December 1) rose by 148 percent, from 101,259 to 251,235, while total entries of these workers—that is, the sum of initial entries and re-entries—rose by 73 percent, from 110,915 to 192,519” (Nakache and Kinoshita, Reference Nakache and Kinoshita2010: 4).
In 2022, approximately 437,000 permanent residents were admitted to Canada, while over 604,000 temporary workers arrived in Canada under either the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) or the International Mobility Program (IMP) (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), 2023). This increase was largely due to the expansion of the IMP work and study permit pathways, as these have fewer restrictions and employer requirements than the TFWP. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of individuals coming through the TFWP remained relatively stable, while the number of individuals with IMP work permits nearly tripled. As the programs have expanded, the employment of TFWs has become increasingly concentrated in low-paying industries including accommodation, food services and retail trade (Lu and Hou, Reference Lu and Hou2023).
While most temporary workers will be destined to urban centres, the emphasis upon labour supply in rural areas reflects the underlying problem to be solved—the need to import labour to meet the demands of the largely extractive rural economy in Canada. For example, temporary workers play a significant historical and increasing role in the agricultural sector. Canada’s Seasonal Agriculture Worker Program (SAWP) is one of the oldest and most utilized TFW programs in Canada (Xu et al., Reference Xu, Lu and Zhong2024; Binford, Reference Binford2019). Beginning in 1966, the SAWP applies to temporary foreign workers from Mexico and a number of Caribbean countries. The program, which brings migrants to work during the Canadian growing season, utilizes a closed work permit which can vary in length from 6 weeks to no longer than 8 months (Xu et al., Reference Xu, Lu and Zhong2024; Binford, Reference Binford2019: 348).
Primarily performing low-skilled jobs, the number of TFWs employed in the agricultural sector has significantly expanded over time. Between 2005 and 2020, the number of TFWs in the primary agriculture sector tripled. In 2019, about 18 per cent of people working in primary agriculture in Canada were TFWs (Xu et al., Reference Xu, Lu and Zhong2024). In 2020, the number of TFWs that came to Canada to work in agricultural industries, which includes activities such as crop and animal production, meat processing and food manufacturing, was 55,171. In 2023, this number grew to 70,267 (Statistics Canada, 2025). While many migrants will return to Canada year after year to work in this programs, TFWs in the agricultural sector in particular, who come through the SAWP or other agricultural TFWPs, have very limited pathways to gain permanent residency (Xu et al., Reference Xu, Lu and Zhong2024; Binford, Reference Binford2019: 348).
Criticism of TFW migration in Canada is substantial and increasing. Although temporary migrant workers have been living and working across the country, including in rural Canada, for decades, these workers were not accounted for in Canada’s immigration targets until very recently (Government of Canada, 2024b), are not intended to access settlement services funded by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), and are considered “temporary,” even though many will apply for, and some will receive, permanent residency (Tuey and Bastien, Reference Tuey and Bastien2023; Chartrand and Vosko, Reference Chartrand and Vosko2021). Despite the significant contributions that TFWs make to the Canadian economy, temporary migration pathways perpetuate precarity and vulnerability among its participants whose residency in Canada is often tied to their employers through the use of closed work permits (Nakache and Kinoshita, Reference Nakache and Kinoshita2010; Roberts, Reference Roberts2020; Carlaw, Reference Carlaw2021).
Employers hold a significant amount of power and control over their employees, as they specify the location and type of work, and in some programs, including the SAWP, they also determine participants’ living conditions, as migrants are required to live in employer-provided housing (Chartrand and Vosko, Reference Chartrand and Vosko2021: 98). Evidence suggests that temporary migration leads to chronic long-term health effects because of migrants’ “increased exposure to work-related injuries and illness as well as barriers to accessing health care” which are compounded by “this population’s limited rights in Canada and increased risk of exploitation” (Salami et al., Reference Salami, Meharali and Salami2015: 547).
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated these health inequities, resulting in increased rates of illness and death while emphasizing the essential role that temporary workers play in Canada’s economy, specifically in the agricultural sector and food production (Landry et al., Reference Landry, Koorosh Semsar-Kazerooni, Alj, Darnley, Lipp and Guberman2021; Bragg and Hyndman, Reference Bragg and Hyndman2022; Akbar, Reference Akbar2022; Helps et al., Reference Helps, Silvius and Gibson2020). Because of these vulnerabilities, the TFW programs have received harsh criticism from the international community, and in 2023 a Special Rapporteur from the United Nations stated that TFW programs in Canada make migrants “vulnerable to contemporary forms of slavery” because “they cannot report abuses without fear of deportation” (United Nations, 2023).
The state of the literature and provision of settlement services
As rural migration pathways have grown and regionalization has become more intensified, so too has the literature on rural migration increased on this topic (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a; McNally, Reference McNally2018, Reference McNally, Labman and Cameron2020; Lam, Reference Lam2021; Dennler, Reference Dennler2022). The literature presents rural migration, across both permanent and non-permanent pathways, as a set of benefits and challenges that can be navigated or mitigated depending on the local context. A recent review of the existing literature found that the identified benefits of settling in rural places vary depending on factors such as the community size, provincial context and economy but can include affordability, increased space, an enhanced sense of community and belonging and possible economic opportunities (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a). The challenges identified speak to the relative lack of diversity in rural places (as compared with large urban centres), the geographical distance of rural places from urban centres (where services are located) and the lower population density in smaller communities, which results in less government funding going to these places (Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, McNally and Hallstrom2024a).
In an effort to mitigate and offset these challenges, a number of solutions have been presented by scholars and advocacy organizations. One of the most common solutions put forward is to increase funding for formal settlement services in smaller communities, which we discuss in detail below (Dennler, Reference Dennler2022; Lam Reference Lam2019; Helps et al. Reference Helps, Silvius and Gibson2020). Other solutions put forward in the literature include utilizing social capital and volunteer networks to fill in service gaps (Haugen, Reference Haugen2019; McNally, Reference McNally2018; Haugen, Reference Haugen, Foster and Jarmen2022; Wilkinson and Garcea, Reference Wilkinson and Garcea2017), fostering and encouraging integration and welcoming attitudes within communities to attract and retain newcomers (Caldwell et al., Reference Caldwell, Arora, Labute, Rea and Khan2017; Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2016; Rural Ontario Institute, 2017) and addressing infrastructure gaps in rural places, such as limited access to public transportation, that present challenges for all rural residents, including newcomers (Ashton et al., Reference Ashton, Pettigrew and Galatsanou2016; Agrawal and Zeitouny, Reference Agrawal and Zeitouny2017; Dennler, Reference Dennler2022).
This literature demonstrates how migrants encounter the long-standing challenges of rural life when they arrive in rural and smaller communities and experience limited access to public infrastructure and other services specific to newcomers, such as settlement services. The provision of settlement services in particular play a key role in the settlement and integration of newcomers into a new society. An examination of the distribution of settlement service funding in Canada further demonstrates regional divides, the urban policy bias and the investment gap between rural and urban spaces across the country, thus revealing the migrant specific experience of the “rural problematique” (Braun and Clement, Reference Braun and Clement2023).
Settlement funding continues to be concentrated in Canada’s biggest cities and has not kept up with changing settlement patterns. While settlement services are funded by a diversity of organizations, including provincial governments, municipalities and community foundations, the largest funder of settlement services is IRCC, the federal department responsible for immigration in Canada. IRCC provides funding to immigrant services agencies (ISAs), which deliver services to newcomers.
While IRCC funding for settlement services has increased over time, funding is regionally concentrated, and “the distribution of IRCC funding is not proportional to the number of newcomers in each jurisdiction” (Braun and Clement, Reference Braun and Clement2023: 263). Funds from IRCC are overwhelmingly concentrated among a few of the largest and most established ISAs, which are located in traditional immigrant-receiving cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. For example, between 2002 and 2018, “the five organizations that have received the most funding (all located in the Greater Toronto area) collected more than $583 million or 11% of IRCC grant funding (and represent less than 0.003% of recipients)” (Braun and Clement, Reference Braun and Clement2023: 265).
There are also significant discrepancies in funding between provinces. IRCC disproportionally favours organizations in Ontario, while per capita funding for immigrants is lowest in Alberta, owing to federal and provincial funding disparities, despite Alberta being the third largest immigrant-receiving province in the country (Braun and Clement, Reference Braun and Clement2023). This concentration of funding among a small number of organizations in Canada’s biggest cities makes it difficult for smaller and newer organizations in rural and smaller areas to secure funds, as they do not often have the expertise needed to apply for IRCC funding, and there is more competition for fewer available grants (Dennler, Reference Dennler2022; Braun and Clement, Reference Braun and Clement2023: 266).
Immigrants who come to Canada through permanent pathways, such as PNPs or the resettled refugee program, receive permanent residency and have access to formal settlement services through IRCC. In contrast, the majority of temporary residents are not eligible to access IRCC funded settlement services (IRCC, 2024). Regardless, many community organizations are still serving these populations. However, they are largely doing so without substantial or stable funding, which limits the supports and services organizations are able to provide (Canadian Senate 2024; 56). Additionally, service provider organizations are accountable to their funders. Thus, they are required to restrict the populations they serve on the basis of the mandates of their funders. Leaders in the immigrant service sector have called on, and continue to call on, IRCC to remove restrictive eligibility criteria and allow all migrants to access IRCC-funded services regardless of status (Roberts, Reference Roberts2020: 987).
The direct result of this funding approach is inequitable service provision, with many organizations unable to hire staff or offer many services. Additionally, the majority of temporary migrants are unable to access federal settlement funding, which perpetuates the vulnerabilities they already face in Canada, particularly in rural places. While many community organizations may serve temporary migrants, they often do so without substantial or stable funding, in large part because migrant workers do not qualify for settlement funding provided by IRCC (Canadian Senate, 2024: 56).
Despite their heightened need for support, the most vulnerable migrants with precarious status are largely excluded from accessing adequate settlement services. In the rural context, disparities in settlement service funding and restrictive funding mandates are exacerbated by the existing gaps in basic services. Residents of rural Canada already face barriers when attempting to access transportation, health and community services. Thus, TFWs in Canada experience the local consequences of rural life even more acutely, largely because of the compounding vulnerabilities associated with their migration status and limited access to both basic and settlement services.
Settlement workers in rural spaces have criticized the inequity of the per capita funding model, which is recognized as only one part of the exclusionary policies of the migration system. On the ground, settlement workers, volunteers, municipal workers and service providers are directly faced with the inequities in the migration system. As a general trend, migrants (including TFWs) often show up in local communities and settlement offices looking for assistance. Knowing that these individuals may have nowhere else to go, settlement workers or other community members try to assist them even without the resources, jurisdiction, extra support, or other community services necessary (especially in very small communities). This leads to high rates of burnout and disillusionment among these individuals who are encountering the human cost of broken and inadequate systems. It is clear that these issues are grounded in maintaining a system focused on economic production, extraction and potential, rather than on the needs of people as residents, potential citizens, or members of a local community (Roberts, Reference Roberts2020; Canadian Senate, 2024; Haugen et al., Reference Haugen, Whiting, McNally and Hallstrom2024b).
Discussion
As a case study, the dynamics of newcomer settlement in rural areas are helpful in demonstrating both the policy inertia and the broader, paradigmatic role of rural places that are institutionally embedded in Canadian economic and social policy. When migrants arrive in rural communities, not only do they face the common challenges created by rural life more generally, but they experience a “double burden” of settlement and limited services that compounds the challenges of settlement and integration. We argue that this is indicative of the broader “rural problematique”—even as rural labour supply is bolstered by immigration programs such as the PNPs, and temporary pathways such as the TFWP and IMP, the underlying role of rural places, spaces and populations in the Canadian economy and politics remains static—defined by extractive industries, both economic and political marginalization and limited or highly targeted fiscal interventions that also tend to emphasize or maintain the economic status quo.
Within this paradigm, migration to rural places is often portrayed as a new disruption (as seen in the use of the term “New Immigrant Destination”) that will alter the character of rural places, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, rather than as the most recent iteration of a broader pattern of settler colonial migration and settlement. This reality is revealed starkly by the TFW program, which relies upon racialized, “disposable labourers” to work in the country on a temporary basis “for the sake of corporate profit, and cheaper food and privatized care for Canadian citizens” (Stasiulis, Reference Stasiulis2020: 47). Not only do TFWs destined for rural places experience the exploitative working conditions inherent in many of these programs and the implications of inadequate, and exclusionary, social policies that limit access to some services on the basis of residency status (Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier, Beland, Marchildon and Michael2019), but they also contend with the “double burden” of settlement in these spaces where services are limited and underfunded.
While per capita funding models disadvantage rural communities in settlement services, similar funding models are pervasive across many types of services accessed by newcomers and long-term residents, such as medical services or public schools. Indeed, per capita funding is not a settlement-specific problem. Rather, funding models based on the number of clients or population density reflect a broader “urbanistic policy bias” (Vilches et al., Reference Vilches, Pighini, Stewart and Goelman2017; Reimer and Bollman, Reference Reimer, Bollman and Douglas2010) in Canadian public policy that centres cities as the ideal models of settlement and service delivery. As researchers have written in the case of rural early childhood services in Canada: “Imagining adjustments to the per capita funding model that would need to be made to accommodate all the possible combinations of need and circumstance confirms that, at its root, the formula does not work for rural areas” (Vilches et al., Reference Vilches, Pighini, Stewart and Goelman2017: 385). Combined with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo, the per capita funding model perpetuates de-investment and underinvestment in rural Canada, with significant consequences for rural residents, and newcomers, trying to access services, regardless of how long they have lived in these places.
The persistence of the urban bias in public policy is indicative of a state that is invested in maintaining the urban core, where power and wealth is located, and the rural periphery, which has been created as a resource-producing hinterland. This reality is evident in recent iterations of rural development policies, which largely fail to intervene in such a way that would disrupt the status quo. While the diversity of employment and economic activity in rural Canada has expanded beyond primarily agricultural or other staples-based activities to include a wide range of sectors such as tourism and service provision, rural development policies continue to target particular activities, such as farming, that do not necessarily serve the broader rural population. Despite the reality that “remarkable economic, technological, and social changes since the 1940s have dramatically altered the rural landscape, …rural policy has remained natural-resource based and sectoral—at least in terms of the actual dollars expended by the Canadian…federal government” (Partridge et al., Reference Partridge, Rose Olfert and Ali2009: 110; Markey et al., Reference Markey, Gunton, Kelly, Pagani and Reimer2023; Markey et al., Reference Markey, Halseth and Manson2008).
This emphasis on economic development, and limited focus on specific sectors, which reproduces the rural periphery, continues to shape the job opportunities available for long-term residents and newcomers alike. While there is some variability from province to province, the “fiscal reality of Canadian rural ‘policy’ remains extractive, economic, and international in orientation” (Hallstrom, Reference Hallstrom2018: 40). In this way, rural spaces have been and are treated as internal, or peripheral, colonies of the Canadian settler state. The state has agency in maintaining the status quo of rural extraction and decline, and Ashwood argues that it should be held “responsible for its role in rural poverty and resource extraction, rather than being only a pawn of the people or profit” (Reference Ashwood2018: 730). Rural places continue to be constructed and naturalized as “big on resources, short on education, high on working class ethics, and low on innovation,” which has worked to maintain the status quo and aid in “the unquestioning treatment of the rural as a dumping ground and a site of extraction” (Ashwood et al., Reference Ashwood, MacTavish, Richardson, Scott, Gallent and Gkartzios2019: 89). The lack of government intervention to change or alter this reality contributes to the contemporary maintenance of the rural–urban divide.
As can be seen from both the migration case study (above) and the broader examination of Canadian state-building as a colonial enterprise, the emphasis of this analysis remains upon the roles that institutions, both formal (such as legislatures, state-based practices and Canadian federalism itself) and informal (such as conventions, assumptions and cultural defaults such as western or linguistic alienation), play in creating the path dependencies that structure the status quo. In particular, given the emphasis upon the continued policy “failure” to address rural versus urban inequities, we wish to focus upon policy stasis as, per Lowi (Reference Lowi1972), an input into, rather than effect of, Canadian politics. In other words, we position policy stasis as a reality that is reinforced and amplified by the institutional arrangements that exist in Canada, and that in turn both shape and reinforce both socio-political attitudes and assumptions about what is possible, feasible and desirable in terms of rural development, the “rural problematique” and the nature of the relationships between geographic, political and economic cores and peripheries.
As a key part of this analysis, we have presented rural migration as a case study, not just of policy stasis but as an example of how institutional arrangements and practices perpetuate the underlying political and economic “games” that have long structured Canadian politics. These institutional dynamics include, as examples, fiscal federalism, sub-national and inter-provincial relations, and in particular the common positioning of rural places and peoples as “hinterlands” with no value other than what can be derived through participation in long-standing and increasingly globalized economic patterns of primary or staples-based extraction, often and largely disproportionately to the benefit of both more centralized industrial and political stakeholders, as well as to the global audience of international shareholders.
These institutional dynamics are not limited to federal or state-building strategies, although they often have their roots in long-term federal interests dating back over 150 years. Federal, provincial and even local governments all participate in the perpetuation of policy stasis through their framing of the “rural problematique,” the “natural” or unavoidable nature of that underlying set of dynamics and the responses that are available within that context of rural policy design. For example, while immigration policy and resettlement is largely framed as a federal policy dynamic (overseen by IRCC), local capacity and governments, as well as service providers, are also caught within that policy paradigm.
Similarly, provincial governments (particularly in the west) have a long history of struggling with both sudden influxes of migration (usually as a response to a surge in employment opportunities) as well as the relatively rapid loss of populations (and economic capital) from both urban and rural spaces. For example, Alberta’s recent “Alberta is calling” campaign, launched in 2022 (which influenced a 4 per cent increase in population growth in the province between July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023 (Dryden, Reference Dryden2023)), is highly representative of multiple components of the “rural problematique:” (1) western territories as “spaces” to be filled through population, (2) western economies as “production” that requires labour (of many forms and substitutability) to persist and (3) western production (particularly of conventional energy) as a necessary condition for national economic growth but also of provincial economic viability and budgetary “independence.” At the same time, that particular campaign paid little attention to the short- and longer-term implications of the potential results—increased and significant demand upon housing, healthcare and educational supply; broader infrastructural pressures at local and regional levels (Dryden, Reference Dryden2023); and an ideological unwillingness to engage with the resultant calls for social policy and related responses from the provincial government (Lightbody and Kline, Reference Lightbody and Kline2016; Hallstrom, Reference Hallstrom2018).
Institutionalization is pervasive; it is present across all levels of government and both formal and informal institutions. This is why the rural problem has not been solved at the municipal or provincial level: because their institutions all reflect the same policy design and inherent assumptions as the federal government. The problem of rurality (defined by distance and density) is taken as a given, as natural, and thus the “solutions” put forward are constrained by the “a priori” assumptions that constructed the rural as problematic in the first place. The colonial state has embedded the “rural problematique” across all levels of formal and informal institutions, and thus, not only federal governments but also municipal and provincial governments have failed rural peoples and places.
Conclusion
Utilizing historical institutional theory alongside postcolonial and critical political economy perspectives, this article applies a different approach and analysis to the challenges that newcomers face in rural and smaller Canadian communities. Moving beyond the construction of rural places as inherently defined by assets and liabilities framed in comparison to urban spaces and populations, this article demonstrates how the contemporary challenges that people, including migrants, in rural and smaller places experience are the legacy of colonial government policies and institutionalized patterns of social, political and economic inequities.
Tracing the relationship between rural and urban Canada across time and space demonstrates how the Canadian state continues to be invested in the extractive logic of the settler state. Founded on Indigenous dispossession and erasure and the extraction of resources from the rural periphery to the benefit of both national and international shareholders, the foundational functionality of the Canadian state has not changed and is, in fact, maintained through the perpetuation of the rural–urban divide. The construction of rural life as problematic is the direct result of a colonial, capitalist system and dominant paradigm that have aided in the creation and maintenance of the Canadian state, certainly since the 1800s and continuing today. The exclusionary dynamics of the “rural problematique” are inherent to the construction and maintenance of the colonial Canadian state. Until this foundational paradigm and the mechanisms upholding it change, attempts at rural development and improved migration and settlement policies in Canada will continue to fall short.
In this article, we have used newcomer settlement in rural and smaller communities as an example of the durability of the “rural problematique.” We have demonstrated how the “problem” of rural Canada is not new and the construction of rural life as a policy challenge has not substantially changed since the creation of the Canadian state. Across rural Canada, the status quo is maintained through both limited and highly selective policy intervention, innovation and investment. Not only does this form of policy inertia reflect a rural policy design that explains the rural migration challenge, but it is also grounded in meeting the other policy priorities of the state that are inherently extractive and exclusionary. The universalist public policies that would be needed to address the challenges that migrants, and particularly TFWs, face are antithetical to the economic functioning of the Canadian state. True universality would require greater harmonization or integration between the urban core and rural periphery. Doing so would essentially break down the extractivist and colonial system upon which the Canada state was founded—a cost that the state is unlikely to bear, both domestically and on the global stage.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by funding from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Additional research supports were provided by Rachel McNally at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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