The Reality of Canada’s Rural Revival
To improve homeownership, a retired politician proposes sending urban dwellers to the country. It is already happening, but not helping.
One of the best jobs you can have in Canada is being a retired MP. Whether you are departing on your own volition, or your constituents have voted you out, you can leave your position knowing that you are just weeks away from being offered a Bay Street board seat, a column in a nationally syndicated paper, or a spokesperson role for a charity or diplomatic mission.
Spend long enough in office, and you can walk away with a pension. Spend enough time out of office, and you can find your footing as a registered lobbyist. And if your entire time as an MP was spent in the backbenches, your post-parliamentary career could end up being a far more rewarding experience.
The other benefit that comes with being in this niche job market is that you are no longer beholden to a party line, meaning you can speak freely about big issues that put current MPs in straightjackets like climate change, agriculture policy, and electoral reform. For the most part, ex-MPs speaking freely allows the public to better understand how policies are brokered behind closed doors. But as one recent interview shows, shooting from the hip can result in some self-inflicted injuries.
Last week, while sitting in her car, former Deputy PM Sheila Copps spoke to BNN Bloomberg about the decades of policy failure that led to Canada’s housing crisis. Most of her remarks were pretty reasonable. As many academics and historians have also observed, Ms. Copps suggested that many of Canada’s housing woes began in the late 80s when the responsibility was downloaded from the federal government to provinces and territories. She notes that many of the premiers, who at the time claimed they had the fiscal and political capacity to administer social housing, either underdelivered or further downloaded responsibility to municipalities. She points to the National Housing Strategy as a turning point in Canadian housing policy, with the federal government beginning to play a more active role in this space.
But when asked about ways to improve overall affordability in the housing market, Ms. Copps went a little off script:
“The other thing we need to look at is what the housing prices are in rural and remote communities versus urban areas and how we can encourage people to move around. We learned during the pandemic that everybody doesn’t have to live in downtown Toronto. There’s lots of opportunities to make people think about migrating elsewhere and getting maybe extra points for a registered homeownership investment plan. These things should be built into the thinking and to have that you really need to have a national government that is not just looking at building housing.”
Putting aside that the remark seemed to downplay the need for governments to facilitate more public and private market housing construction in big cities, the statement paid little attention to current urban-rural population trends. When Ms. Copps left office in 2004, the demographic health of Rural Canada was uncertain as annual population growth teetered around 0%. However, Canada’s rural communities have seen significant growth since the change of government in 2015. In the past two years, the collective growth rate for rural areas surged to around 1% annually.
To some extent, international immigration is helping keep Rural Canada’s population afloat (more international migrants moved to non-urban areas last year than ever before). However, the biggest components of population growth in rural areas are inter- and intra-provincial migration from more urbanized parts of the country.
This growth has corresponded with an outflow of residents from big urban areas (census metropolitan areas) to both smaller centres (census agglomerations) and rural communities. Rural Canada has been the biggest beneficiary of the flight from major cities. In 2021, the biggest urban net contributors to rural population growth included places like Montreal (24,295), Toronto (12,759), Vancouver (3,337), and even Ms. Copps’ hometown of Hamilton (2,166).
Another thing we know about Canada’s rural resurgence is that it is driven by children and working-age adults, suggesting that growth is due to movement by families with young kids rather than boomers looking to retire out in the country.
It is clear that Canada is already seeing the urban exodus that Ms. Copps is calling for. But it has not materialized into higher rates of homeownership. 12 of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories saw their owner share of households fall between 2016 and 2021, with the largest drops being observed in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. PEI in particular has faced significant shortages in rental and ownership markets, driven in large part by unprecedented interprovincial in-migration.
But even if the trend of urban-to-rural growth is to continue in the coming years, it would be unlikely to provide benefits to urban holdouts either. For starters, housing demand in urban areas will not subside significantly because growth in CMAs is still being driven by international immigration and natural population increases (i.e., more births than deaths each year). More needs to be done to build housing for current and future residents rather than forcing renters out of Canada’s urban centres.
There is also an economic and ecological risk of dedicating agricultural and forested areas for development. Canada loses more than 2,700 acres of farmland each day — pushing more people out of cities would likely worsen this rate of ag land deterioration. Many rural communities experiencing new growth (including from domestic sources) will find themselves having to zone more land for greenfield development in the absence of reliable federal and provincial funding that would support more compact communities.
It is absolutely worth celebrating the fact that Canada’s population is growing, including in areas that have been traditionally stagnant such as rural and northern regions. But as Canada continues to see high population growth, building more must be prioritized over forcing people out of their communities. A former MP can propose the latter while taking an interview from their car, but it really should be young Canadians in the driver’s seat when opining about where they should live.
