New immigrants to Canada rarely move to or stay in rural Canada and that is a problem for Canada’s farmers seeking workers, says a Canadian farm leader.
“These are folks we need in rural Canada but we have a problem attracting them and keeping them,” said Ron Bonnett, Canadian Federation of Agriculture vice-president and a member of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council.
This summer, the CAHRC will publish the results of a farm employer survey, which will report that up to nine percent of farm jobs now are unfilled. The shortage is expected to rise to almost 25,000 by next year and to 52,000 by 2013.
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Bonnett said immigrants, particularly from rural areas, could help fill the gap.
“At the council, we certainly have had discussions about what we can do to make rural jobs more attractive to immigrants,” he said. “What do we do, not just to provide jobs, but the cultural and social support necessary to attract and keep people?”
Last week, Statistics Canada reported that immigrants comprised just 5.3 percent of the rural and small town population in 2006 and they were more likely than long-time residents to move away.
In the general population, immigrants make up about 20 percent of the population.
The report by researchers Roland Beshiri and Jiaosheng said most rural immigrant residents arrived in the country before 1986.
The 2006 census count of 6.2 million immigrants made it the highest proportion of the Canadian population since the early 1930s when hundreds of thousands of European immigrants attracted to Canada to populate the rural Prairies still were on the land.
The Statistics Canada report said rural British Columbia attracts proportionately more recent immigrants and Saskatchewan joins Newfoundland and Quebec as the least likely destination.
Manitoba’s Winkler and Steinbach and Alberta’s Brooks, Lethbridge and Fort McMurray were home to a disproportionate share of immigrants in 2006.
Beshiri and Jiaosheng said many rural communities look to immigration as a way to grow.
“The retention of a population, especially new arrivals, is one measure of community success,” they wrote. “For most provinces, the retention of the rural population in general is difficult and this is even more so for recent immigrants who are relatively more likely to migrate.”
A recent report by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on the need for stronger federal support for rural Canada acknowledged that attracting immigrants to areas outside the cities is a tough sell.
“Rural communities tend to be more homogeneous than urban centres with respect to the immigrants’ country of origin,” said the report. “They are also generally more homogeneous with respect to ethnic diversity. That can create barriers to social inclusion for potential immigrants where differences in cultures and lifestyle conflict.”
Bonnett said the key is finding ways to attract groups of foreign workers to rural areas so they have a community of fellow residents who speak the same language, have common interests and shared cultural values.
“It is not enough to make jobs available,” he said. “We have to look on the cultural side to what rural communities can create and offer that would attract immigrants who can do the jobs that need to be filled.”
He said one option could be a change in assessment rules to award points to potential immigrants with rural job skills and a willingness to settle outside a major city.
