Communities on the edge: An economic geography of resource-dependent communities in Canada

Our impressions of Canadian resource-dependent communities are often still influenced by the classic works of Innis, Robinson, Lucas, Siemens, and others. Although this research has proven to be valuable, it has also established several generalizations regarding these settings, including the perceptions that community labour forces and economic structures are relatively homogenous, that nonresource sectors play an insignificant role in the communities, and that these communities a re found primarily in isolated northern regions. These generalizations are now beginning to be questioned given the rapid economic and social changes taking place in these communities and the recent theoretical and empirical contributions of geographers and other social scientists. This paper summarizes this classic research, then challenges these generalizations by discussing recent applications of the concepts of economic restructuring and labour-market segmentation theory to the context of resource-dependent communities. To further illustrate these characteristics, the paper then presents an empirical analysis of 220 Canadian resource-dependent communities across six resource sectors, focusing specifically on their labour-market characteristics and the relationship between resource dependence and spatial isolation.