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Abstract

Rurality and remoteness are policy-relevant concepts for planning and evaluating equitable access to services across Canada, yet existing measures rely on categorical, urban-centric, and coarse spatial definitions that obscure variation in accessibility across the rural-urban continuum. The Canadian Accessibility and Remoteness Index Plus (CARI+) is a small-area accessibility index at the dissemination-area level. It is based on road-network travel to stratified service centres, including population centres and 24-hour emergency departments stratified by settlement size. Category-specific scores are capped at 3, summed to produce an overall score, then normalized.

We examined the CARI+ values against socio-demographic indicators and compared them with the Index of Remoteness (IOR). CARI+ yields a more even population distribution than the IOR (39% vs 77% in the most accessible category) and reveals socio-demographic gradients: material deprivation and Indigenous identity increase with remoteness, while educational attainment and immigrant representation decline. In very remote areas, CARI+ identifies 25% of Indigenous residents and 27% of the population with less than high school education, versus 78% and over 50% respectively under the IOR. The CARI+ provides a transparent, service-specific, high-resolution measure of accessibility that addresses key limitations of existing Canadian indices and supports nuanced analysis for health and social service planning.

This article is part of our , which aims to make disaggregated data on health and social service access available for researchers and planners in Canada.

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Citation

McGaughey, T., & P. A. Peters. 202670:. Introducing the Canadian Accessibility and Remoteness Index (CARI+). Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 70, e70082.