The gap between the realities of rural and urban Canada, identified as a major and damaging fissure in the country, is about to become more pronounced.
Statistics Canada last week projected that during the next 20 years, immigration and a high birth rate among immigrants will increase the visible minority portion of the Canadian population to more than 30 percent.
And by 2031, the percentage of Canadians born elsewhere could reach as much as 28 percent, the highest percentage in a century.
For the Canadian nation, this can be nothing but good news. This influx will enrich society by injecting opinions, perspectives, ideas, skills and talents from around the world.
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It will strengthen the economy by providing the workforce with ambitious young people at a time when the traditional Canadian population is aging with a low birthrate that leaves fewer young workers to support the growing legion of retiring baby boomers.
The bad news is that it will further separate and alienate rural Canada from the cities that will welcome the vast majority of these immigrants.
A Statistics Canada analyst said last week that fully 96 percent of these millions of immigrants are expected to settle in Canada’s 33 metropolitan areas, most of them in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
The implications for rural Canada are profound. Increased growth in urban Canada eventually will skew the political map toward urban representation in Parliament and legislatures, reducing further the political power of a declining rural sector.
Industry in search of a workforce will obviously ignore attempts at rural diversification to invest in urban areas with abundant workers.
And the divide in attitude and understanding will grow. The newly arrived residents of major cities will have little understanding of or empathy toward what rural Canada considers its values based on tradition and history.
Statistics Canada predicts that by 2031, just two decades away, visible minority Canadians will comprise 63 percent of Toronto’s population and 59 percent of Vancouver’s. Larger cities including Calgary and Ottawa will be approaching 40 percent.
Smaller communities, including rural and Quebec centres, will have far fewer visible minorities. In a nation of immigrants, Quebec will see its position weakened.
So it will be for rural.
Last year, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities lamented the difference in visible minority presence between urban and rural settings, noting that rural populations are noticeably older and whiter.
The Senate agriculture committee in a 2008 report on rural poverty said rural Canada is increasingly being marginalized and it suggested one solution would be to attract more immigrants to rural Canada.
Statistics Canada says the opposite will happen.
Ironically, the last time the immigrant population represented such a large part of the Canadian population was a century ago and many of those immigrants were the east Europeans who populated the rural prairies and created an economy that now lacks workers because it cannot attract immigrants.
