Kate LeBlanc/TORONTO STAR
Two years ago, our annual Canada Day special report compared Canada with its bête noire and sibling to the south, and we liked, and were sometimes surprised, by what we found. Last year, we tested Canada against the wider world and again performed impressively. In this edition, we turn inward, using the same evolving array of studies, surveys, and census information to compare the provinces to each other on various economic, social, and medical metrics.
The differences, in many cases, are jarring. We have grown accustomed to startling economic disparities among the provinces: the survey confirms, for example, that Alberta has the country’s highest labour-force participation and its highest weekly wage, though it serves to add the valuable caveats that Albertans spend the second most amount of time at work and are the least likely of all Canadians to have a pension plan. What’s perhaps more interesting is the subtler ways in which the basic texture of life differs between provinces (and the territories, by no means forgotten, but left aside from our charts, with regret, because their small populations and unique socio-economic structures produce volatile, extreme data).
What mysterious virtue, for example, makes Nova Scotians devote 20 per cent more of their time to volunteering than Saskatchewanians? How can one part of the country (Newfoundland and Labrador) have literally twice as many heart attacks as another (B.C.)? How is it that nearly 20 per cent of the workforce is self-employed in B.C. when the number is closer to 10 per cent in New Brunswick?
The simple variables in our charts conceal worlds of complexity. The three-year gap in life expectancy between Newfoundland and B.C. doesn’t look like much, for example, but it is almost as large as the four years of life Canadians would gain from the overnight elimination of all cancer. Health-wise, the figures suggest that B.C. is among the world’s most favoured jurisdictions, while Newfoundland lags behind Greece or Costa Rica.
It is tempting to explain the gap by pointing to other charts that show Newfoundland’s high rates of obesity and smoking, but are these numbers merely manifestations of underlying socio-economic variables? According to recent Canadian research, one can predict premature death in a region or community pretty well knowing only a handful of “deprivation” factors. If you can count the number of single-parent families and persons living alone on one hand, and measure employment, income, and education on the other, you can do a pretty good job of guessing population health without looking at any other behavioural or genetic factors. (Newfoundland probably derives a significant health benefit from having a large number of people in their twenties living with their parents (52.2 per cent)—if you leave aside the likelihood that they’re doing so because they’re broke and can’t find work.)
There may not be any number in these charts that isn’t connected to some equally fascinating matrix of cultural processes. New houses in Quebec are the smallest in the country: this points to an urbanized, dense, aging population where the mean family size is (despite recent gains) significantly smaller than anywhere else in Canada. Quebec’s lingering attachment to TV and its relatively slow acceptance of the Internet tell the tale of a besieged linguistic culture where old media are much more than just a buffet of amusements. Homicide rates, which are lowest in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, ostensibly defy explanations based on poverty, but the disturbingly simple linear relationship between homicide rates and Aboriginal population ratios tells a story behind the story.
Striking, persistent differences such as these will seem objectionable to those who think of Canada as progressing continually toward homogeneity. One thing we know pretty confidently about the economic differences is that labour mobility intensifies them, rather than reduces them. We live in a free, decentralized federation wherein people are at liberty to migrate from place to place. That’s good for the economy overall; considering labour strictly as a commodity, we all benefit when it flows to where it is needed and where it will be most productive. But the result is to make the provinces less equal, as human capital departs the less productive regions and puts them at risk of entering a downward spiral.
That’s a major reason we have interprovincial equalization, and it’s one argument for our relatively open-door immigration policy, since inbound foreign labour tends to counterbalance the inequality effects of migration within Canada. Canadians may rarely see raw counts of interprovincial migrants, and the numbers are slightly surreal. In the 2006 census, 852,580 Canadians reported that they had changed provinces in the prior five years. Of these migrants, 226,865, or more than one-quarter, had ended up in Alberta. Ontario had 185,785; B.C., another 164,710, including nearly 63,000 from Alberta itself. The old story is not over yet: Canada’s centre of gravity is still moving westward.
It is perhaps counterintuitive that a nation-building project like Confederation still looks like such a crazy quilt. Even the bits of Canada entirely planned and settled by other bits of Canada don’t look that much alike. Nothing but a north-south line on a map separates Alberta and Saskatchewan; that line could have been put somewhere else or drawn east-west, and the two provinces could have been left as one or turned into four. Yet barely 100 years after they were arbitrarily divided, “Albertans” and “Saskatchewanians” differ discernibly and are not shy about pointing out those differences.
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