Population, Employment, Social Composition, and Urban Structure in Northern Ontario: Expansion and Decline in a Hinterland-Colonial Region, 1871-2021

Though 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. This "moose in the room"--hinterland-colonial conditions--deserves much greater attention. This study provides original tables on Indigenous relative to settler populations, treaty and reserve areas, and provincially controlled "unorganized territories." It examines colonial biases in the census data as a contribution towards decolonizing changes in official statistics. More broadly, it offers an overview of major long-term population, employment, and urban concentration trends since 1871 in the region now called "Northern Ontario" (or "Nord de l'Ontario"). Based on original historical tables, the study discusses patterns of change at not only Northern Ontario regional level relative to Southern Ontario but also at the district and community levels. Further, the study examines employment-population ratios, unemployment, and economic dependency, particularly for recent decades of decline since the 1970s, and it questions narrowly demographic explanations of population decline. Attention is given to the misuse and variety of dependency ratios in understanding Northern demographic conditions. This research was based at Laurentian University in Sudbury and is a background study in the Northern Democracy Initiative.