Employment Structure in Rural and Small Town Canada: The Primary Sector - ARCHIVED

The rural employment picture is changing quickly in Canada. As in most western nations, primary industries in Canada are losing jobs. This provides a challenge to national, provincial and local decision-makers to find new goods and services to export in order to help stabilise the employment levels in communities that are dependent upon primary sector employment. The purpose of this bulletin is to investigate the changing structure of primary sector employment in rural Canada in the 1980s and the 1990s. Specifically, we look at employment in the agricultural industry and employment in all other primary industries (i.e. fishing, logging and forestry, mining and oil and natural gas extraction, and hunting and trapping).