Population, Employment, Social Composition, and Urban Structure in Northern Ontario: Expansion and Decline in a Hinterland-Colonial Region, 18712021

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Description

Though deeply experienced by Indigenous peoples, the settler-colonial structure of Northern Ontarios development plays little explicit analytical role in official government discussions and policy. This "moose in the roomhinterland-colonial conditionsdeserves much greater attention.

This study provides original tables on Indigenous relative to settler populations, treaty and reserve areas, and provincially controlled unorganized territories. It examines colonial biases in the census data as a contribution towards decolonizing changes in official statistics.

More broadly, it offers an overview of major long-term population, employment, and urban concentration trends since 1871 in the region now called Northern Ontario (or Nord de lOntario). Based on original historical tables, the study discusses patterns of change at not only Northern Ontario regional level relative to Southern Ontario but also at the district and community levels.

Further, the study examines employment-population ratios, unemployment, and economic dependency, particularly for recent decades of decline since the 1970s, and it questions narrowly demographic explanations of population decline. Attention is given to the misuse and variety of dependency ratios in understanding Northern demographic conditions.

This research was based at Laurentian University in Sudbury and is a background study in the Northern Democracy Initiative.

Author Bio

David Leadbeater (Author)
Dr. David Leadbeater was raised in BC and Alberta. He taught in the Economics Department at Laurentian University from 1989 until 2021. His teaching and research interests are in the economic development of Canada, urban and regional economics, labour economics, and colonialism and economic theory. He holds degrees from the University of Alberta, Oxford University, and the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Resources, Empire and Labour: Crises, Lessons and Alternatives and Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury.