"Canada is a big country," the websites of immigration consultants say.
True, Canada covers almost ten million square kilometres. It's second in geographic size only to Russia. Its forests, grasslands, mountains, rock and tundra stretch as far as the eye can see.
But when it comes to human choices, Canada is not big at all: The vast majority of the country's residents live in congestion on a tiny sliver of the country's land mass, typically near the U.S. border.
Broad swaths of Canada's hinterland, the small towns and rural areas beyond urban centres, are losing people, despite Canada having the fastest growth and immigration rates among the Group of Eight industrialized countries.
Almost all immigrants, foreign students and temporary foreign workers in Canada avoid the hinterlands. Only one in 40 immigrants live in small town or rural Canada, compared to one in five who are born in the country.
Canada has more than seven million foreign-born residents out of a total population of 35 million. They account for two-thirds of the country's growth.
But almost three in four newcomers move to just three cities: Toronto, Montreal and Metro Vancouver.
Nine of 10 immigrants who come to B.C. choose to live in its southwest coast metropolis. The 2016 census shows the city of Vancouver is the most densely populated municipality in the country.
Canadian statisticians call the country's large and medium cities are "sinkholes," since almost everyone drains into them.
The sink-hole effect exerts intense pressure on housing and rental costs, transit, higher education, traffic congestion, noise and social services in large cities.
While big cities grow because of migration, the opposite is happening to small cities, such as Quesnel, B.C., St. John's, New Brunswick and Timmins, Ontario.
The migration "sink-hole effect" exerts pressure on housing and rental costs, transit, higher education, traffic congestion and social services in large cities. The city of Vancouver is the most densely populated in Canada.
Can anything be done to revive Canada's hinterland, while relieving the squeeze on Canada's urban centres and their suburbs, including those of fast-growing Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa?
Apparently oblivious to Canadian studies that show immigrants do better financially if they stay away from the country's big cities, most observers claim there is no way to change the "inevitable" flow to urban centres.
Such commentators not only bow to laissez-faire economics to make their case, they justifiably point to how Section 6 of Canada's 1982 Charter of Rights provides "mobility rights" to all citizens.
Even permanent residents, those who have applied for citizenship, get almost the same freedom of mobility in Canada (except for the right to exit and enter when they please, since they have to physically reside for two years out of five in the country.)
While freedom of movement in Canada is to be celebrated, it can also lead to cynical policies, like Quebec's immigrant investor program, which each year welcomes several thousands wealthy newcomers, mostly from China, in return for their modest financial "investment" in Quebec.
The trouble is, with mobility rights, Quebec can't require those multimillionaire immigrants to stay in the province. And they don't. A strong majority immediately buy property in Metro Vancouver, inflating the already absurd housing prices.
It would be hard to require anyone in Canada, including permanent residents and immigrants, to move to rural regions, or even smaller cities.
The proverbial "stick" - of coercion - would not be allowed, let alone appreciated.
But what about offering "carrots" of encouragement?
It's been done before. From the 1870s to 1930s Ottawa offered free land to immigrants and refugees, much of it on the Prairies or in B.C.
The raw land was given to newcomers after they proved over several years they were developing it for homesteading, farming or logging.
A carrot approach is being tried in parts of Scandinavia. Sweden, for instance, has experimented with offering more generous social housing and welfare rates to immigrants and refugees who move to its smaller towns.
It wouldn't be complicated to offer some carrots in Canada, especially to the one million people living here as permanent residents.
What about fine-tuning Canada's immigrant point system - which favours those with high educational and skill levels - to grant extra points to newcomers who settle in Canada's hinterlands?
That's a suggestion from Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who frequently advises the federal government.
A points system that favours permanent residents who have shown (in part through their income-tax statements) they are committed to making a life in Quesnel, Timmins or St. John's could do a lot for those cities. The small cities' schools would fill and their housing and retail markets would strengthen.
Rather than Metro Vancouver and Toronto experiencing unaffordable property and rent costs - in large part because of high in-migration and offshore real-estate speculation - smaller cities and rural areas could enjoy modest boosts from the foreign-born.
Pressure would also ease on Metro Vancouver's and Toronto's over-stretched transit systems, as suggested by a StatsCan study that shows immigrants and foreign students rely on taxpayer subsidized transit at double the rate of Canadian-born residents.
A little-known Statistics Canada study found most immigrants who settle in Canada's small towns do better financially than the majority who choose Canada's 13 largest cities.
A hinterland-related immigration points system is not far-fetched, even in Canada.
Kurland says it's already virtually in place, in various ways, in B.C.'s provincial nominee program, which oversees a portion of the province's skilled and educated immigrants.
Citizenship court judges dealing with people who are applying to be accepted as immigrants on compassionate grounds, Kurland adds, have also been known to treat favourably migrants who live in small towns.
The carrot approach would not only breathe new life into the hinterlands, it would give a leg up to immigrants themselves.
A little-known Statistics Canada study by Andre Bernard found that most immigrants who settle in Canada's small towns do better financially than the majority who choose Canada's 13 largest cities.
His report, "Immigrants in the Hinterland," found newcomers who move to small towns and rural areas not only more quickly learn an official language, they soon earn more than other immigrants and those born in Canada.
That not only benefits the immigrants and their children, it does the same for our increasingly struggling small towns.
