Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871–2021

Based on original historical tables, Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871–2021 offers an overview of major long-term population, social composition, employment, and urban concentration trends over 150 years in the region now called "Northern Ontario" (or "Nord de l'Ontario"). David Leadbeater and his collaborators compare Northern Ontario relative to Southern Ontario, as well as detail changes at the district and local levels. They also examine the employment population rate, unemployment, economic dependency, and income distribution, particularly over recent decades of decline since the 1970s.

Although deeply experienced by Indigenous peoples, the settler-colonial structure of Northern Ontario's development plays little explicit analytical role in official government discussions and policy.

Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871–2021, therefore, aims to provide context for the long-standing hinterland colonial question: How do ownership, control, and use of the land and its resources benefit the people who live there?

Leadbeater and his collaborators pay special attention to foundational conditions in Northern Ontario's hinterland-colonial development including Indigenous relative to settler populations, treaty and reserve areas, and provincially controlled "unorganized territories." Colonial biases in Canadian censuses are discussed critically as a contribution towards decolonizing changes in official statistics.
This study aims to provide an overview of major population, employment, social composition, and urban concentration trends since 1871 in the region now called "Northern Ontario" (or "Nord de l'Ontario" or "Ontario-Nord"). The study pays special attention to the pattern of decline in population and employment that has been occurring in the last several decades not only in aggregate, but also at the district and community levels. The study raises some structural issues of economic development underlying the labour market and distributional disparities described as well as discusses certain measurement issues particularly related to economic dependency.[A1] More detailed analysis of the economic conditions of decline is beyond the present task. Nor is the study focused on immediate policy issues but rather on contributing to a deeper empirical basis for policy discussion. To heighten the importance of the larger trends treated here for policy, the study will refer to some aspects of current dominant policy thinking, such as in the Province's Growth Plan for Northern Ontario (2011) and some publications of the provincially funded Northern Policy Institute.



The early development of Northern Ontario occurred in the context of a vast Canadian colonial expansion in territory and settlement westward and northward, particularly following Canadian transcontinental railway development from the 1880s. As established at Confederation (1867), the then province of Ontario occupied a smaller territory of about 263, 000 km2 above the St Lawrence River and Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior (Map 1). But by 1912, when Ontario's boundaries reached their current limits, the province had more than tripled its size to over 900, 000 km2, most being through colonial expansion into Northern Ontario.



This territorial and settlement expansion was based mainly in southern Ontario and grew out of its earlier colonization. Northern Ontario came to cover approximately 87 percent of the land area of Ontario (Table 2 data). Typical of settler colonial place-naming patterns, the area was also called "New Ontario" (or "Nouvel-Ontario") . This study uses the term "Northern Ontario" (or "Nord de l'Ontario") reflecting more contemporary common terms.



The process of defining the region of Northern Ontario has been a matter of contention. For purposes of the present study, we need to address particularly the issue of the southeastern boundary, w