 | | Mario Lefebvre
Director
Centre for Municipal Studies |
How many of you think that rural communities are trapped in a downward spiral both population-wise and on the economic front? For all of you raising your hands, I must confess that I understand your position since I was thinking the same thing about one year ago. That was before I took a long, hard look at Quebec’s rural communities. The Conference Board’s Centre for Municipal Studies spent the past year studying the economic contribution of Quebec’s rural communities. The study, entitled Les Communautés rurales: L’autre moteur économique du Québec, was an eye opener.
True, the province of Quebec, like the rest of Canada and, in fact, like the world as a whole, has been undergoing an urbanisation process over the last century, as the rural share of the population declined and the urban share increased. However, over the 1991 to 2006 period analyzed in this study, the rural share of Quebec’s population was actually fairly steady, declining only slightly from 26.4 per cent in 1991 to 26.1 per cent in 2006. Interestingly though, rural communities located near an urban centre, i.e. within a Census Division which includes an urban centre, saw their share of the provincial population rise from 8.4 per cent in 1991 to 9.1 per cent in 2006.
Our study goes on to show that not only have people left the central built up areas to live in lower density suburbs, but a good proportion of jobs have moved out as well. In fact, our results show that employment growth in Quebec’s urban communities averaged 0.7 per cent per year from 1991 to 2006, slower than the 1 per cent annual average in rural communities. In rural communities located near an urban centre, employment growth reached an even stronger 1.7 per cent per year, more than double the pace of urban centres.
Are you tempted to argue that rural communities are less productive? Don’t go there either. Labour productivity growth in Quebec’s rural communities averaged 1.9 per cent per year from 1991 to 2006, while it averaged 1.6 per cent per year in Quebec’s urban centres. All in all, the combination of stronger employment and labour productivity growth led to faster real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Quebec rural communities over the past fifteen years. Specifically, real GDP growth in Quebec’s rural communities averaged 3 per cent per year from 1991 to 2006, compared with 2.3 per cent per year in urban centres. In rural communities located near an urban centre, real GDP growth reached an annual average of 3.6 per cent, a sound performance indeed.
It is also wrong to assume that the economies of Quebec’s rural communities are dominated by primary industries such as agriculture, forestry and mining. True, the industrial composition of rural communities remains much more heavily geared towards the goods-producing industries. The share of goods sector output in Quebec’s rural communities stood at 41.2 per cent in 2006, compared with 23.4 per cent in urban centres. But the study also shows that Quebec’s rural communities, like its urban counterparts, are undergoing an industrial shift towards the services sector.
All in all, the GDP of Quebec’s rural communities stood at $47.4 billion in 2006, or 19.6 per cent of Quebec total GDP. That share stood at 18.2 per cent in 1991. And according to an economic footprint analysis conducted by Statistics Canada, every dollar of activity in the rural communities leads to an additional 48 cents of economic activity in the province of Quebec and another 19 cents in the rest of Canada (primarily in Ontario). Putting it another way, Quebec’s rural GDP of $47.4 billion contributes $22.5 billion in economic activity in the urban portion of the province and another $9.2 billion in the rest of Canada. Please note the use of the verb “contribute” rather than “generate”. This is because the footprint does not mean that if Quebec’s rural communities were to disappear, the $22.5 billion in economic activity in the urban portion of the province would also disappear. But still, the footprint shows important complementarities between economic activity in the rural portion of the province and its urban counterparts.
Finally, the study points to one big challenge awaiting Quebec’s rural communities. In fact, this challenge applies to every community in Quebec and for that matter, in the country as a whole. This is the challenge of attracting people. If rural communities are to remain vibrant moving forward, they will need to be able to attract people. To do so, as our City Magnets report showed in 2007, they will have to offer not only sound economic prospects, but access to health care services, education and cultural activities, to name a few. In other words, they need to offer a high quality of life. But it is not feasible for the Quebec government to open a hospital and a university in every rural community. Instead, regional strategies should be developed, in which, as much as possible, each region will be able to offer all the required services.
The complete study can be found on the website of L’Union des municipalités du Québec.