In some Canadian towns, the most dependable community event is the going-away party. The hall gets booked, the cake gets ordered, the same songs get played and another 18-year-old, or 26-year-old, or young family of four gets celebrated as they had out toward a future everyone agrees is somewhere else.

In the places where this happens most often, people have learned to read the economy not from the business pages but from the rental listings and the thinning pews: Things must be going well somewhere, because everyone keeps leaving to find it.

The numbers suggest they aren’t wrong. The national economy can be growing, but GDP doesn’t take into account the empty main street. Productivity statistics don’t record which town the productivity happened in. We measure an economy by what it produces. People experience it by whether they can find work, learn new skills and build a life where they live. An economy can look stronger statistically even as some communities become weaker.

What opportunity actually is

Ask the people at the going-away party what opportunity means, and they’ll say it’s work you can find and keep. It’s a skill you can learn without moving away to learn it. It’s a job that uses what you know and pays what a life costs. Underneath all of it, it’s the ability to stay or to leave by choice. When staying is impossible, leaving may look like opportunity, but it‘s often a necessity. 

The wheel turns in both directions

Skills and opportunity feed each other, but only at close range. Retrain an electrician for heat pumps in a region with no retrofit work, and you’ve handed him a ticket he may have to use three provinces away. The situation also works in reverse, and it can happen quickly: employers who can’t find capability don’t expand, young people who can’t find work don’t stay and when they go, their skills go with them, giving the next employer who looks one more reason to look elsewhere. Entire regions know the sound of that.

Communities that reverse this cycle tend to do the same thing. For example, a northern community trains personal support workers because local parents are aging, and graduates walk into work the week they finish. A college program exists because the retrofit contracts exist locally, and the contracts keep coming because the program does. A young woman completes her practical nursing credential in the town where she will use it, does her placement at the hospital where her grandmother was born, and signs a contract without packing a single box. This is what happens when training, employers and community needs are connected in the same place.

A different ledger

You could judge a region by a ledger the statistics don’t show. How many people found work this year without leaving? How many learned something new within an hour of their own kitchen? How many who left came back because they found something worth coming back to? How many businesses stayed open because the capability they needed was fostered down the street?

It’s not just about economic growth

For decades we have asked one question of the economy: Is it growing? It’s a fair question that Canada has often answered well. The harder question is asked far less often: growing for whom, and exactly where? An economy that runs on skills is a fine thing. But communities run on opportunity, and a country is not just its outputs. It is its places, and whether the people who love them can afford to stay.

Sources

This commentary draws on: Finch et al., The Coming Storm: The Eight Forces Reshaping Regional Labour Markets and Untapped Potential: Mapping the Open Learning System (The Productivity Project, 2025); and Statistics Canada data on interprovincial and rural-urban migration.