Northern Ontario has faced demographic and labour force challenges for several decades now. Northern Ontario accounts for 90 percent of the province’s land mass but only about 6 percent of its population and though overall population appears to have stabilized since 2016, that share of population continues to decline as the rest of Ontario grows faster than its north. To this long-term trend has been added the impacts of technological change and the digital economy as well as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result,given its aging population structure, issues of labour shortage have also come to mark the northern Ontario economy.
How to attract and retain labour in northern Ontario in both the short and long term is a pressing issue for the future growth and welfare of this diverse and sparsely populated region. To date, much of the literature on labour force shortages and migration has been descriptive. What factors are important in attracting and retaining population and labour forces in northern Ontario? Given the presence of a substantial post-secondary education sector in the region, what factors and determinants are crucial in retaining skilled graduates for the labour force of the future.? To this effect, a pan-northern research team (of which I am pleased to be a member of) has begun a research project to address these questions and has obtained Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant funding to help obtain some answers.
The project is titled “Northern Ontario Labour Force Retention and Attraction in a Post-Pandemic, Digital Economy.” This is a broad-based survey project building on a pilot study that investigated factors influencing local graduate retention rates for Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie. The pilot developed and tested a survey and then completed a review on labour retention policy in the region. This research project scales up the investigation of graduate retention and contributing factors to migration in Northern Ontario, and the retention rates of all the region’s post-secondary institutions to identify factors influencing the regional retention of graduates qualified to fill labour shortages. Of special interest are the region’s unique demographic patterns, push and pull factors, migration networks, labour attraction and retention policies, and leveraging graduates’ temporary work permits. A combination of student and graduate surveys, focus groups, and secondary data will be used to examine the significant factors of graduate retention and ultimately aims to develop recommendations for how the region can retain more of its existing skilled labour pool and attract more skilled migrants. The study will also investigate the effectiveness of the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP) program in graduate retention.
The research team is interdisciplinary and includes social and community development experts, Northern Ontario economists, and labour market experts. The university-based research team includes Dr. Nusrate Aziz (Algoma) as Principal Investigator, Zeel Patel (Algoma) as Senior Research Assistant, Dr. Sean Meades (Algoma), Dr. Sadequl Islam (Laurentian), Dr. Livio Di Matteo (Lakehead) and Dr. Natalya R. Brown (Nipissing). To date the project has also hired two students (Alex and Kashfia) – one based at Laurentian University and the other based at Lakehead University - to assist with the conduct of surveys targeting students enrolled in 3rd, 4th, and 5th year (graduate) studies as well as focus groups involving university and college level staff and administrators involved in recruitment and retention initiatives. The surveys have begun, and the subsequent pool of data will yield a rich source of socio-economic data on a demographic vital to the future prosperity of northern Ontario. If you are contacted by our team for input, we hope you will take the time to help us out.
