Profiling Competitive Rural Regions in Canada

Enhancing competitiveness of rural regions has become a priority for rural development agencies in Canada and across OECD countries. Competitiveness, as defined by the former federal Rural and Co-operatives Secretariat, is the capacity of a rural area to attract and retain investment, people and jobs while maintaining viable economic activity and stable or rising standards of living for the inhabitants in the area. This study provides a demographic and socio-economic profile of “competitive regions” by focusing on the capacity of a region to retain and attract people, as measured by population change between 2001 and 2006. For this reason, this research used the concept of self-contained labour areas (SLAs) as defined by Munro et al., 2011 and looked at the competitiveness among regions within two peer groups: larger SLAs (population of 100,000 or more) and smaller SLAs (population of less than 100,000). Within each of the two peer groups, three levels of competitiveness were defined based on the average population growth of the peer group. This study provides an overview of the SLAs in the two peer groups and the three competitiveness levels within those groups, together with a demographic and socio-economic profile of these areas.