No One Has to Order Us into the Cities

It began with a question that sounded simple enough: is the government slowly trying to move people out of rural communities and into cities, where we will become more dependent upon commercial systems for the necessities of life?

It is the sort of question that can be answered too quickly from either direction. One person hears it and immediately declares a conspiracy. Another hears it and dismisses the whole concern as paranoia. Neither answer requires much investigation, and neither one does justice to what rural people can see happening around them.

So I followed the rabbit.

What I found was not evidence of one secret Canadian plan whose stated purpose is to empty the countryside and manufacture obedient consumers. What I found was something less dramatic, more ordinary and, in some ways, more difficult to confront. Governments, banks, utilities, retailers and service providers do not need to sit around the same table. They only need to follow the same arithmetic: concentrate services where there are more people, withdraw them where there are fewer, and transfer the cost of distance to whoever remains.

The result can resemble a relocation policy even when nobody publishes one.

The long road toward the centre

Canada has been urbanizing for generations. Statistics Canada reports that in 1851, roughly 84 percent of the population lived in rural areas. By 2011, fewer than one Canadian in five did. That enormous change was connected to industrialization, mechanized agriculture, wage employment, education and the concentration of services. It cannot reasonably be blamed on a single modern government or policy.

We should not pretend, however, that Canadian governments have never deliberately encouraged people to leave small communities. Newfoundland and Labrador’s resettlement programs provide a documented example. Between 1965 and 1970 alone, 16,114 people from 119 communities were resettled. The reasoning was recognizable: concentrating the population would make public services and economic development easier and less expensive to provide.

Those memories did not disappear when the formal programs ended. A later Newfoundland and Labrador public consultation recorded residents describing the gradual removal of teachers, medical professionals, grants and other services as “resettlement by stealth”. That phrase matters. It describes a process in which nobody is physically ordered from a home, but the supports required to remain there are removed one by one.

The evidence that complicates the claim

If there were one unified contemporary plan to depopulate rural Canada, we would have to explain the policies moving in the opposite direction. The federal government maintains a Rural Economic Development Strategy, funds rural infrastructure and operates a Rural Community Immigration Pilot intended to attract workers and permanent residents to rural and remote communities.

The population numbers are not a simple story of everyone being funnelled toward Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver either. Statistics Canada’s recent estimates show that from 2021 to 2025, rural and small-town populations increased in ten of the thirteen provinces and territories. Between July 2024 and July 2025, Ontario recorded a net movement of more than 15,000 people from functional urban areas into rural areas and small towns. The countryside is not emptying in one uniform national march. The movement runs in both directions.

Government housing policy also needs to be read accurately. Programs such as the Housing Accelerator Fund openly encourage denser housing, mixed-use neighbourhoods and development near transit. Those are real urban-concentration policies, but their stated objectives are to increase housing supply, use infrastructure efficiently and reduce transportation pressures—not to order existing rural residents into cities. Some of the same funding also reaches smaller communities.

This counter-evidence is important because a rabbit trail should lead where the ground goes, not where we had already decided it must end. There is no persuasive evidence here of one coordinated master plan. But that does not make the broader pattern imaginary.

The institutions are leaving before the people do

A community does not cease to be viable only when its last resident leaves. It begins to weaken when the ordinary institutions that make daily life possible decide that the community is no longer worth serving.

Consider banking. According to the Canadian Bankers Association, Canada had 6,205 bank branches in 2012 and 5,656 in 2022, a decline of nine percent. Measured per 100,000 adults, the reduction was about fifteen percent between 2012 and 2021. Urban branches close too, but an urban customer may have several alternatives within a short distance. When a rural community loses its only branch, banking itself leaves town.

Federal rules recognize that difference. Where a rural branch has no other deposit-taking branch within ten kilometres, the bank must provide six months’ notice, notify the local government and publish notice locally. Those rules may give residents time to prepare, but they generally manage the closure rather than prevent it.

The bank saves the expense of a building and its employees. The resident acquires the expense of reliable internet, a suitable device, digital competence and transportation to the next town whenever an in-person service is unavoidable. A private cost has not vanished. It has merely been moved from the institution to the customer.

Health care follows a similar geography. A Statistics Canada proximity study found that approximately 97 percent of people in large metropolitan areas lived within a three-kilometre drive of a health-care facility. In rural areas, only about half did. That measurement does not tell us whether a doctor is available or how long the wait will be, but it captures the first barrier: the service is physically farther away.

Now add schools, government counters, repair shops, grocery stores and public transportation. Each closure is announced as a separate decision. Each one may be justified by its own budget. Yet rural residents do not experience them separately. They experience the accumulated distance.

The rural access penalty

Distance has a price, and rural people often pay it more than once.

Natural Resources Canada identifies transportation costs, local competition, consumer choice and sales volume among the reasons gasoline prices differ between communities. Remote stations generally pay more to bring fuel from the refinery or terminal. Smaller markets may have fewer stations competing for customers and lower sales volumes over which to spread fixed costs.

The rural resident can therefore face a higher price per litre while also needing more litres. The bank is farther away. The hospital is farther away. The job, school and large grocery store may all be farther away. In a city, transit, walking or a short drive may provide alternatives. Across much of rural Canada, the vehicle is not a luxury. It is the admission price for participating in ordinary life.

Electricity reveals the same density calculation. In Ontario, the commodity price of electricity may be standardized under a chosen price plan, but delivery costs depend upon the infrastructure required to reach the customer. Hydro One openly classifies customers by urban, medium and low density, and Ontario maintains Distribution Rate Protection and Rural or Remote Electricity Rate Protection because rural delivery is intrinsically more expensive.

The difference is especially clear for small businesses. In Hydro One’s 2026 schedule, a general-service customer using less than 50 kilowatts faced a distribution charge of 3.26 cents per kilowatt-hour in an urban area and 7.33 cents in a non-urban area. The non-urban monthly service charge was also higher. The published rates show that a rural business can pay more than twice the urban distribution charge before it sells a single product to a neighbour.

That cost eventually appears somewhere. It appears in the price on the shelf, in the wage that cannot be offered, in the repair that is postponed or in the decision that the business can no longer remain open. The closure then reduces local competition and forces residents to travel farther, returning us to the gasoline pump once again.

Efficiency is not the same as independence

The strongest part of this rabbit trail may not be about what rural residents are charged. It may be about what urban residents lose the practical ability to do for themselves.

Cities are efficient at the scale of systems. One water main can serve hundreds of homes. One transit route can move thousands of people. A hospital can draw specialists and equipment into one place. That efficiency is real, and it can improve lives. But efficiency for the system is not the same thing as autonomy for the household.

A rural property may provide enough land for a serious garden, an orchard, chickens, a greenhouse, food storage, rain collection, a workshop or a woodlot. None of those things guarantees self-sufficiency. Land requires knowledge, health, time, tools and money, and rural living should never be romanticized as effortless independence. What the land preserves is the possibility of producing at least part of what the household needs.

Urban residents can and do grow food on balconies, indoors and in community gardens. Their ingenuity deserves respect. The limits are nevertheless visible in the data. Statistics Canada found that in 2023, 66 percent of owner households grew fruit, herbs, vegetables or flowers for personal use, compared with 38 percent of renter households. Most growers used a yard; only a small minority used a community garden. Tenure and housing form shape the opportunity to grow.

A few pots of herbs can restore relationship and teach a great deal, but they ordinarily cannot supply a household with potatoes, squash, beans, fruit and preserved food through an Ontario winter. When land access disappears, food becomes something almost entirely purchased rather than partly produced.

Heating follows the same distinction. A rural homeowner may be able to install a wood stove, maintain a woodlot, store fuel or keep more than one source of heat available. An apartment resident normally uses whatever system the landlord, utility or condominium corporation has selected. That does not automatically make urban heating dirtier. Ontario’s electrical grid draws heavily upon nuclear and hydroelectric generation, alongside natural gas, wind, solar and bioenergy. Electric heat can therefore be relatively low-carbon even though not every generation source is renewable. The deeper issue is that the resident usually cannot choose, repair or replace the system independently.

Nor does rural freedom of choice guarantee low energy costs. Ontario’s own Electrification and Energy Transition Panel observed that rural households have much higher overall home-energy costs than urban households, largely because many do not have access to pipeline natural gas and instead rely upon electricity, propane, oil or wood. The ability to choose among imperfect alternatives is still not the same thing as having an affordable alternative.

In the city, food, heat, water, shelter and waste removal arrive through managed networks. Those networks can be remarkably reliable—until access depends upon employment, rent, a functioning account and the ability to keep paying. The household becomes efficient because it has outsourced much of its survival.

Naming the pattern without inventing the conspiracy

Two thinkers helped me understand what this rabbit had uncovered.

In Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott examined how large administrative systems simplify complicated local realities into forms that can be measured and managed from the centre. Scott was not writing specifically about present-day rural Ontario, and it would be unfair to claim that he proved this argument for us. His work nevertheless gives us a useful lens: dense, standardized populations are easier for institutions to see, serve and administer than scattered households with different local practices.

Ivan Illich offered another useful idea in Tools for Conviviality: the “radical monopoly.” This is larger than one company controlling a market. It occurs when one kind of system becomes so dominant that meaningful alternatives become difficult or impossible. A person may theoretically remain free to walk, grow food, heat with local fuel or bank in person, while the world around them is reorganized in ways that make those choices increasingly impractical.

That, I believe, is closer to what we are seeing.

There does not need to be a secret meeting between Ottawa, the banks, Hydro One, grocery chains and municipal planners. Each institution can follow its own incentives. Governments often seek administrative efficiency. Banks seek lower operating costs. Retailers seek volume. Utilities price the cost of distance. Developers seek profitable density. Environmental policy favours shorter trips and shared infrastructure. None of those motives, examined alone, proves an intention to manufacture dependence.

Put them together, however, and they produce a recognizable direction of travel. Rural residents pay more to reach fewer services. Urban residents receive closer services but lose land, choice and the capacity to provide more of life’s necessities directly. One side is penalized for distance; the other is rewarded for surrendering autonomy to centralized networks.

A Pagan question of relationship and place

This is where the subject belongs on Unplugged Pagan.

Paganism is not made authentic by a postal code. A person living in a high-rise can maintain profound relationships with the seasons, the ancestors, the local watershed and the other-than-human world. A person surrounded by a hundred rural acres can remain completely disconnected from the land beneath their feet. City Paganism is no contradiction, and rural residence is no spiritual credential.

But land access matters. The ability to plant, harvest, compost, preserve, mend, build and gather fuel changes our relationship with necessity. Food is no longer only a product appearing beneath fluorescent lights. Heat is no longer merely a number on a bill. Water does not begin at the tap, and waste does not cease to exist when the truck carries it away.

Those acts teach reciprocity because the consequences remain near us. The soil answers what we put into it. The woodpile remembers whether we prepared in summer. The pantry records both abundance and neglect. Self-sufficiency is never complete—we have always depended upon neighbours, craftspeople, trade and community—but local competence gives us something different from commercial isolation. It allows dependence to become visible, chosen and reciprocal rather than distant, mandatory and anonymous.

That is not nostalgia for some imaginary past in which everyone lived alone in a cabin. It is an argument for preserving human-scale choices: the right to grow meaningful amounts of food, to use safe local heating alternatives, to maintain local businesses, to reach essential services without surrendering an entire day, and to remain in a rural community without being charged repeatedly for the privilege.

The difference between intended and accepted

I cannot honestly conclude that the Canadian government is operating one concealed program to force rural people into cities for the purpose of increasing commercial dependence. The evidence does not establish that claim, and some evidence directly complicates it.

I can conclude that governments and corporations repeatedly make decisions that privilege density, centralization and institutional scale. I can conclude that these decisions progressively remove services and productive choices from rural communities. I can conclude that the resulting costs are transferred to rural residents, while urban residents are made increasingly dependent upon landlords, utilities, retailers and managed systems for basic necessities.

Most importantly, I can conclude that these outcomes are foreseeable.

Once an outcome is understood and the same decisions continue, the question changes. We are no longer arguing only about whether dependence was the original intention. We must also ask why it remains an acceptable consequence.

A serious rural policy would measure more than population growth and infrastructure cost. It would measure how much practical choice remains. Can residents still obtain cash and speak to a banker? Can an older person reach health care? Can a household grow food or maintain a safe backup source of heat? Can a small business survive its delivery charges? Can young people build a life locally rather than being told that opportunity lives somewhere else?

The rabbit did not lead me to a hidden room where powerful people were drawing arrows from every farmhouse toward the city. It led somewhere far more familiar: to the locked door of a former bank, the long drive to a medical appointment, the higher number at the gasoline pump, the delivery line on a hydro bill and the small balcony expected to take the place of a garden.

No one has to order us into the cities if remaining outside them is made steadily more expensive, more inconvenient and less possible.

There it goes again.

Godspeed.

Sources and further reading

Published by Lugh Sulian

Standing on the Ledge: Rebuilding from the Rubble—an ongoing, real-time record of what happens after collapse, when old rules stop functioning and new ones haven’t yet earned trust. View all posts by Lugh Sulian

Published August 30, 2026