The delivery of ‘rural’ health care services has long confronted the geographic problems of distance, low user densities, low‐order facilities and caregiver shortages. As a result, rural and remote communities across Canada have struggled with health care delivery. For rural and remote communities in resource hinterlands, population ageing driven by industrial restructuring presents a significant departure from past experience. Drawing on examples from northern British Columbia (BC), this paper examines this context of ageing in rural and remote locations with the purpose of highlighting impending challenges for health care service provision. In the first part of this paper, we provide a demographic overview of population change and ageing in northern BC. In the second part, we present data on the availability of services throughout the region to support seniors who age‐in‐place. Population ageing, in areas that have never dealt with this issue before, highlights not only important servicing questions but also important policy questions about how to provide for needs that the policy and community context are not presently equipped to meet.
This paper brings together two separate rural and small town community research areas. The first involves patterns of migration while the second involves the economic restructuring of work in Canada's single‐industry resource‐dependent communities. Our expectations regarding household migration in such communities still derive largely from Lucas' model of community development in single‐industry towns where significant migration activity declines as the community matures. However, contemporary economic restructuring pressures are upsetting this stability and it is therefore appropriate to re‐examine the conceptual model. Household mobility is examined using information for three communities in British Columbia's central interior. The “reasons for moving” which households identify are first examined to delineate a set of migration motivations. This is then extended by looking at the types of communities from which the households have moved. A community typology, based upon population size, frames a discussion which emphasizes previous residential experience with metropolitan and non‐metropolitan locations. The findings suggest that most inmigrants come for employment opportunities. The findings also suggest that while urban locations are important contributors of in‐migrants, most relocated from other rural and small town communities. The scale of contemporary economic restructuring and the scale of migration as a component of local population change suggest that there are a number of alternate futures for community development beyond the “Maturity” stage Lucas identified. Beyond the detailed results, implications for small resource‐dependent communities include that: 1) in‐migration for employment is an important community change dynamic, 2) the uncertainty of employment stability due to industry restructuring may be creating a ‘transient‘ cohort of workers, and 3) both of these processes generate important social geography pressures which in turn can affect local community development.
L'intérèt de cet article est de réunir deux thèmes de recherches différents sur les communautés rurales et les petites villes. Le premier touche à la répartition de la migration et de la mobilité alors que le second touche à la restructuration économique du travail au Canada dans les communautés monoindustrielles essentiellement dépendantes d'une seule activité. La migration des ménages dans de telles communautés s'explique largement à partir du modèle de développement communautaire des villes mono‐industrielles à vocation unique de Lucas, là où l'importance de la migration dæcline en fonction de la maturité de la communauté. Toutefois, les pressions économiques contemporaines de restructuration bouleversent cette stabilité, il est donc nécessaire de réexaminer ce modèle conceptuel. La mobilité des ménages est analysée en utilisant l'information de trois communautés de l'intérieur de la Colombie Britannique. Dans un premier temps, les raisons du déménagement que les ménages identifient sont étudiées pour décrire l'ensemble des mot...
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