Introduction

For most people, the word “commuter” brings to mind someone who leaves home in the morning to travel downtown to work and who makes the return trip in the evening – in other words, someone who lives in the periphery and works in the urban core.  Research on commuting within Canada’s major cities (CMAs) indicates that although this remains a common trend, the commuting flows are becoming more complex with increasing periphery-to-periphery flows (Heisz and LaRochelle-Côté 2005).

Various studies have focused on rural commuting, (Schindegger and Krajasits 1997; Green and Meyer 1997; Mitchell 2005), but outside major agglomerations the understanding of the multidirectional nature of commuting patterns is currently more limited.  This bulletin is a first attempt to assess the multi-directional nature of commuting patterns in rural areas. We show that commuting patterns, and specifically rural commuting patterns, are more complex than a simple core-periphery approach, typically depicted as a set of circles centered on an urban core, would suggest.

One of the main findings of this analysis is that, among Canada’s rural and small town residents, rural-to-rural commuting is as important as rural-to-urban commuting. In other words, rural commuters are as dependent on rural labour markets as they are on urban labour markets. Commuting flows out of communities tend to be multidirectional and do not merely follow a periphery-to-core flow.

This bulletin presents baseline data on the pattern and size of rural commuting flows in 2001 and provides a better understanding of how rural communities are affected by both urban-bound commuters and rural-bound commuters. It also shows that Canada’s Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations (larger urban centres), which are delineated on the basis of commuting flows, essentially constitute self-contained labour markets. Overall, only 4% of the jobs in these urban areas are filled by people commuting in from rural areas. The remaining 96% are jobs being filled by residents of the urban areas themselves.

The data used in this analysis comes from the 2001 Census of Population. Census Sub-Divisions (CSDs) (Box 1) are classified as either part of a Larger Urban Centre (LUC) or part of a Rural and Small Town (RST) area. The methodological challenges caused by the multidirectional nature of commuting flows (discussed in Box 2 and 3) should be kept in mind by the readers when interpreting the results.

We acknowledge that the use of different census geographies and different definitions of commuting would, to some extent, modify these results. Nonetheless, the existing research that focused on commuting flows within CMAs has also shown the increasing complexity of commuting flows within these urban delineations, as well as the rapid growth of periphery-to-periphery flows. Hence, the overall findings presented in this bulletin highlight trends that should be considered in any further research on rural commuting and rural labour markets.

This work complements and adds to existing research which has highlighted the increasing complexity of commuting flows within Canada’s urban areas, particularly the rapid growth of commuting from one part of the periphery of the urban area to another part of the periphery as opposed to commuting from the periphery to the centre. This analysis is also a first step toward the identification and profiling of rural labour markets.