Core Regions In Western Canada

A core region offers advantageous geographic locations which allow for accessible transportation, resource extraction and access to large populations. Core regions can be defined more succinctly than periphery, which can range from rapidly growing regions with expanding populations to resource frontiers which have had little development or probing for resources. Bone (2013) makes reference to an original core periphery model that says, “there is one core and three periphery regions, in that analysis Ontario and Quebec would be considered core and the remaining regions would be considered periphery regions” (p.17). A shift from periphery to core is potentially imminent for a region like Western Canada. A number of challenges and conditions would …show more content…
The total population of all of Western Canada is less than half the size of the population of Ontario. Having a lower population size has obvious setbacks, Stadel(2009) emphasizes that, “economic policies at the regional or national level[…]often favour the interests of the cores” (Stadel, P. 14). As a result of higher population concentration, cores have more political representatives because Seats in the House of Commons are distributed in proportion to the size of the population. This prevents large sections of a population from having equal representation in the legislative body. While population is an obstacle preventing Western Canada from becoming a core region, Stadel (2009) argues that, “the number of immigrants settling in western and Atlantic cities have increased every year in the past five years” (p. 5). This is a positive indication for Western Canada that a shift is underway and that employment opportunities and economic growth are resulting in large population increases. According to Gordon (2011), “employment opportunities are an important factor behind[…]inter-provincial migrations”(Gordon, 2011). Western Canada’s Oil Industry has created employment opportunity resulting in an influx of newcomers to the region, resulting in higher populations. Stadel reinforces that, “[this] phenomenal population growth…has been fuelled by the dynamic development of the petroleum and natural gas resources” (p.16). In addition to population increase the an increase in global demand and trade is currently being seen with Automobile exports and gas and oil exports currently rank as the top two exports in the