By Dayo Ojerinde
New Canadian Media

Zeel Shah moved to the neighbourhood of Windermere in Edmonton from Toronto and quickly found that the quieter life she and her husband wanted came with an immediate challenge: Getting around without a car.

On weekends, when buses ran less frequently, Shah sometimes walked for half an hour in -20 C temperatures to catch the bus to work. Missing it meant waiting another hour.

“I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a negative experience,” Shah said. “For me, it was simply part of the initial struggle of settling into a new city.”

Seven years later, she has little desire to return to the big-city lifestyle she left behind.

Shah’s experience illustrates the challenges facing Canada's immigration strategy: Attracting newcomers to communities outside of the country's biggest metropolitan centres and convincing them to stay.

Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver remained the leading destinations for recent immigrants in the 2021 census, but their combined share fell from 56 per cent in 2016 to 53.4 per cent in 2021.

Statistics Canada also found that 4.4 per cent of recent immigrants were living in small urban centres and 3.2 per cent had settled in rural areas.

The federal government's current Rural Community Immigration Pilot offers permanent residence to skilled workers who want to work and settle in 14 rural and more remote communities.

Whether newcomers stay depends on much more than their immigration status. A job can bring someone in, but is it enough to keep them?

Suneet Kukreja, who came to Canada in 2015, sees that distinction every day. She manages the YMCA of Owen Sound Grey Bruce’s Immigrant Services in Ontario, which helps permanent residents settle across communities in Grey and Bruce counties.

Kukreja said employment is key to whether families remain, but having one employed member of a household may not be enough.

“If there is something for both the partners, then there is retention,” she said.

The YMCA program has worked with families where one partner had a job they loved while the other could not find work in their field. Some eventually moved to Manitoba or British Columbia because both partners had better employment opportunities there.

For Chioma Ibeh, employment was an important consideration when she and her family chose a small waterfront community in northern Ontario.

Ibeh, who was born in Nigeria, trained as a nurse in the U.K. before immigrating to Canada in August 2024. Her family was looking for employment opportunities, a healthier work-life balance and a safe environment in which to raise their children.

The local hospital helped ease their transition by providing a list of available rental properties and employment opportunities for both Ibeh and her partner.

Shah and her husband also considered employment when they moved to Edmonton. It took a couple of months for Shah to find a job in her field, food quality assurance.

Kukreja said sustainable employment that matches newcomers' skills remains one of the biggest challenges in her job. Professionals can spend years trying to re-enter occupations for which they trained before coming to Canada because their credentials aren’t accepted.

“To sustain themselves for those two to three years, folks pick up any kind of entry-level jobs that they can land their hands on,” Kukreja said.

Finding jobs isn’t the only consideration. Newcomers also need transportation, childcare, healthcare and housing, which can be more challenging to find outside Canada’s major urban centres.

Kukreja said transportation is one of the biggest barriers in the Grey Bruce counties.

“There is no inter-municipal transit system in most of the counties,” she said, adding that employment even 30 minutes from home can be difficult to reach without a vehicle.

Shah eventually became comfortable in Edmonton, but healthcare and childcare remain challenging. She doesn't have a family doctor and relies on walk-in clinics.

When her son was six months old, the family registered him at several daycares. They waited more than a year for a space to open up.

Ibeh’s family found housing, although it was not as affordable as they had expected. Public transportation is limited, and residents seeking a wider range of shopping options travel more than an hour to a larger centre.

Her children attend a French-language school, but she said families have fewer educational options than they would in a larger city.

When communities applied for funding under the federal immigration pilot project launched in January 2025, IRCC also assessed whether they had the infrastructure and services required to accommodate newcomers, including healthcare, housing, education and settlement organizations.

Another issue is trickier to quantify.

“To be honest, it can be difficult to make friends when you move to a different city or province, especially when you don't have family or an existing social circle there,” Shah said.

Kukreja said social isolation is a significant settlement issue.

“No matter how good a job you have, no matter how well settled you are, you still need to have that community connection,” she said.

Her YMCA program organizes community activities designed to create those connections.

Ibeh has found some of those connections through activities organized by her hospital, union, religious community and the growing community of Nigerians settling in her northern Ontario community. She said local residents have been welcoming, and she has not experienced isolation or discrimination.

IRCC's 2023 Settlement Outcomes Report found that newcomers who participated in a previous pilot program reported a strong sense of belonging to their local communities, with stronger belonging among those who accessed settlement services or community-level supports.

The report, drawing on a survey of 276 newcomers conducted in 2022, found that 93 per cent were still living in the rural community where they first settled, and 88 per cent had no plans to leave.

Among the top reasons respondents gave for staying were that they liked living in a smaller or rural community, liked their job and felt welcomed.

For those who had left or planned to leave, the leading reason was access to services unavailable locally, such as specialized doctors or higher education.

For Ibeh, living in a smaller community is still her choice, but she is uncertain whether the family will be there long term. There is no university, and career advancement may also be a factor.

Shah, however, does not want to return to the big-city lifestyle she left.

“We have become comfortable with this lifestyle, and we still value having a quieter and more peaceful environment,” she said.

Kukreja said governments could do more before newcomers arrive by providing realistic information about opportunities outside metropolitan areas, increasing awareness of rural settlement services and improving pathways for internationally trained professionals to have their qualifications recognized.

After years of helping newcomers establish themselves in Grey Bruce counties, she believes retention ultimately involves something less tangible than immigration programs or economic incentives.

“I think one of the biggest lessons that we learned from our past, and we still continue to work on it, is how you make people feel,” Kukreja said.

“If they feel welcomed and they feel that they belong to the space, then they will ask you for all the wraparound services, and their success in the community depends on that.”