Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871-2021 - (Canadian Studies) by David Leadbeater (Paperback)

About the Book

Northern Ontario can be understood as a hinterland-colonial region. This book offers an overview and statistical reference source for Northern Ontario on population, employment, and urban concentration since 1871.

Book Synopsis

Based on original historical tables, Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871-2021 offers an overview of major long-term population, social composition, employment, and urban concentration trends over 150 years in the region now called "Northern Ontario" (or "Nord de l'Ontario"). David Leadbeater and his collaborators compare Northern Ontario relative to Southern Ontario, as well as detail changes at the district and local levels. They also examine the employment population rate, unemployment, economic dependency, and income distribution, particularly over recent decades of decline since the 1970s.

Although 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.

Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871-2021, therefore, aims to provide context for the long-standing hinterland colonial question: How do ownership, control, and use of the land and its resources benefit the people who live there?

Leadbeater and his collaborators pay special attention to foundational conditions in Northern Ontario's hinterland-colonial development including Indigenous relative to settler populations, treaty and reserve areas, and provincially controlled "unorganized territories." Colonial biases in Canadian censuses are discussed critically as a contribution towards decolonizing changes in official statistics.

Review Quotes

Overall, this book should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand the economic development of Ontario in general and its north in particular. Moreover, it generates a plethora of questions and approaches for future statistical research on northern Ontario's economic history and development.--Livio Di Matteo "https: //www.erudit.org/en/journals/onhistory/2025-v117-n1-onhistory09996/1117631ar.pdf"

David Leadbeater sheds light on demographic and socio-economic change in Northern Ontario in order to confirm the persistent, pervasive trends affecting the region since 1871.--Rachel Barber "https: //onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cag.70000?msockid=3a932818a9d96d8921093ce4a8f36cff"

It is a deep dive into population changes in the north over the past century. It is a bleak picture of the decades of struggle to find sustainability in the great northland. A roadmap of economic underdevelopment, social stagnation and outmigration.
For academics and researchers, the breakdown of the numbers will no doubt be helpful. But what gives this work value is that it interprets the data through a political lens.

--Charlie Angus, MP "https: //www.policymagazine.ca/empire-ontario-and-the-neglect-of-the-north/"

About the Author

David Leadbeater (Author)
David Leadbeater, Ph.D., was raised in BC and Alberta. He taught in the Economics Department at Laurentian University from 1989 until 2021. His teaching and research interests are in the economic development of Canada, urban and regional economics, labour economics, and colonialism and economic theory. He holds degrees from the University of Alberta, Oxford University, and the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Resources, Empire and Labour: Crises, Lessons and Alternatives and Mining Town Crisis: Globalization, Labour and Resistance in Sudbury.