Data and definitions

Box 1
Data sources and definitions

The firm

The data on firms were taken from Statistics Canada's Business Register. The Business Register comprises a list of all active businesses in Canada that have a corporate income tax (T2) account or are an employer or have a GST account with an annual gross business income of over $30,000. This paper excludes establishments that do not maintain an employee payroll even though these establishments may have a workforce of contracted workers, family members or business owners. This was done because the Business Register does not ascribe a size (in terms of employee numbers) to these establishments. This criterion for sample selection also means that the self-employed who do not have any employees are excluded from this study.

Note that the Business Register has coded firms for each year from 2003 to 2007 according to the 2001 geographic structure (Box 2). Hence, our analysis focuses on the 2003 to 2007 period to be able to show the structure and the change of firms within constant geographic boundaries.

Manufacturing firms

A manufacturing firm is an enterprise classified according to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) as having their main activity to be manufacturing. Specifically, these are all the NAICS codes in the 2-digit groups of 31, 32 and 33. For details, see Statistics Canada (2007).

Size of firm

Firms are divided into size categories according to the number of persons they employ. The number of employees is estimated from data on payroll remittances and the estimated number of employees is reported in terms of "full-time equivalents." This is the approximate number of employees if each employee worked a full-year. For instance, 10 full-time equivalents could represent 20 employees who each worked for half a year, or any similar combination. The Business Register makes this calculation by dividing the amount of the total payroll by the average pay of the employees.

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Box 2
The geography

Larger urban centres comprise both census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and census agglomerations (CAs)

In this bulletin, we use the 2001 delineation of larger urban centres and rural and small town areas because the firms on the Business Register are coded to the 2001 geographic grid for the 2003 to 2007 period.

A census metropolitan area (CMA) (according to the 2001 delineation) has an urban core with a population of at least 100,000;
A census agglomeration (CA) has an urban core population of 10,000 to 99,999.

Both CMAs and CAs include all neighbouring municipalities where 50% or more of the workforce commutes to the urban core.

Rural and small town ( RST ) areas comprise towns or municipalities outside CMAs and CAs. These RST areas are disaggregated into four census metropolitan area and census agglomeration influenced zones (MIZ) based on the size of commuting flows of the labour force to any CMA or CA. The Strong MIZcategory comprises areas where 30% or more of the labour force commute to a larger urban centre. The Moderate MIZcategory comprises areas where between 5% and 29% of the labour force commute to a larger urban centre. The Weak MIZcategory comprises areas with a commuting flow of more than 0% and less than 5%. The No MIZcategory comprises those areas where no individuals commute to a CMA/CA. The strength of commuting flows between rural areas and urban centres serve as a proxy for the degree of economic and social linkages between a rural area and a larger urban centre.

For further information on MIZ, see McNiven et al. (2000).

It should be noted that because the RST areas in the three Territories are classified solely as "Non-CMA/CA Territories," with no disaggregation into MIZs, businesses located in Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut are excluded from this study.

Resource-reliant communities are defined by Natural Resources Canada (2001) to be census subdivisions (i.e. incorporated towns and municipalities) where 30% or more of their economic base is generated from the value chain of one of the resource sectors (agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining and energy). The economic base is estimated as an income-weighted level of employment that is attributable to producing goods and services above the needs of the community and is thus available for export from the community (to international markets or other domestic markets). The details of the delineation are provided in Appendix C.

In 2001, 37% of the census subdivisions in RST areas were "resource-reliant communities" (Appendix C, Table C.1). These resource-reliant communities contained 53% of the RST population.

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