The Small-Town Viability Question in a Prairie Context

The phenomenon of population reversal away from major urban centres to small towns is considered in a Canadian context. Specifically, the paper examines towns from the Manitoba portion of the prairies which have benefited from modest population gain in the period 1966–1976. It relates that population change to a number of factors presumed to be influential in this essentially rural nonmetropolitan milieu. These embrace objective quality-of-life indicators, objective measures of economic activity, and subjective indexes expressing people's preferences for small-town living. A two-part model of small-town population change is construed, one part to focus on the relationships between population change and economic activity for the 1971–1976 episode and the second part to deal with the situation pertaining to 1966–1971. The division is maintained in order to trace nonrecursive as well as recursive effects on population change. The preeminence of social as opposed to economic factors is a major conclusion arising from this model.