Volume 17, numéro 1, 2026 Special Feature on Remoteness—Part One

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This article highlights a collaboration involving seven Métis cancer survivors from Northern Saskatchewan, alongside researchers and staff from the Saskatchewan Network Environments for Indigenous Health Research (NEIHR) and StoryCentre Canada. Over a span of four days at Back to Batoche, a key Métis cultural event, participants worked with StoryCentre staff to exchange their cancer experiences and create their own digital stories. The research team partnered with Terri Hansen-Gardiner, a Métis knowledge keeper, cancer survivor, and advocate, to co-develop the project in partnership with her community. The participants shared insights about the challenges they faced in accessing care and the factors that supported their recovery. The findings from this project reveal that digital storytelling is an important tool for advancing social justice and advocating for policy and program changes that strengthen Indigenous well-being, sovereignty, and self-determination.

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The costs of providing social, community and health services in remote communities are potentially much higher than in non-remote communities, due to a range of factors including higher transportation and additional labour costs. Ensuring equity in service delivery requires funding to be indexed appropriately for these additional costs. The question of how to adjust funding to account for costs associated with remoteness is conceptually and methodologically challenging. We present the issues involved in measuring remoteness and the indexation of funding to measure remoteness in the Canadian context, with particular attention to remote First Nations. We also consider the data requirements in the context of First Nations, including issues of community versus agency-level data and of appropriate data ownership and control.

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The objective of the community consultations was to ensure that the voices of the communities were heard in planning how to use any increase in funding associated with remoteness. Every community requires a detailed accounting of services that are being provided and services that will be needed to ensure that children have the opportunity to reach their full potential within their own communities. The community factors affecting the well-being of children and the need for services to address these concerns must be clearly articulated and reflected in any report intended to address the inequities in the current service delivery model. The experts on what is needed are the communities themselves. The task facing researchers and decision-makers is to clearly understand those needs and the costs of both providing and supporting the implementation of necessary services. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work.

To conduct this engagement we covered visits to 19 remote First Nations belonging to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) where members provided their perspectives and insights on how living in geographically remote communities impacted the availability of child welfare services. The engagement uncovered a set of complex relationships and expectations that exist among the three Indigenous child and family service agencies serving NAN communities, regarding how funding should appropriately compensate for remoteness to improve the lives of children and families. These themes encompassed the lived experience of community members and the importance of the distinct community character and local culture. The findings demonstrated the importance of continued resource support for increased child welfare services in the NAN communities compared to equivalent non-remote communities.

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Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) is examining options to offset the costs of remoteness for First Nations and provide a rationale for additional funding for remote communities. This article presents best practices for building a measure of remoteness as well as an analysis of measures of remoteness used in Canada and in Australia. An evaluation of the various measures of remoteness against the best practices determined that the Index of Remoteness developed by Statistics Canada in partnership with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada is currently the most robust measure of remoteness available.

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The geographic proximity of any given community to population centres, services, and facilities can be a key factor for socio-economic outcomes and community growth. To provide accessible information on proximity for community stakeholders and policy development, the Centre for Special Business Projects has worked with Indigenous Services Canada to develop the Index of Remoteness, a continuous index available for all communities in Canada that measures the relative distance to population centres for that community within a set radius, weighted by population size. This review catalogues the development of that index and a set of subsidiary projects based on the index that have expanded the amount of information available on this topic to include specific facility types or additional index options.

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There is evidence that providing services in remote communities is more expensive than in non-remote ones. Existing methods for adjusting funding to account for these costs have various limitations. This article documents the development of a new methodology from Indigenous Services Canada for estimating the additional costs due to the impact of remoteness, for program funding and budgetary considerations.* The “Cost Adjustment Factor” is a generic formula that could be used in the absence of program-specific information. To develop the Cost Adjustment Factor, we applied regression analysis to the Index of Remoteness, transportation infrastructure, employment allowances of federal employees, and shipping costs data on a sample of 278 Isolated Posts in Canada. Based on the results of the regression analysis, an illustrative First Nations community with an Index of Remoteness of 0.8 and access by air would have a Cost Adjustment Factor of 125.6%. Sensitivity analyses based on various sample specifications and analytic criteria showed that the Cost Adjustment Factor is statistically robust to specific assumptions that were tested.