The dominant paradigms in contemporary Canadian inner-city research have been documenting the influx of well-educated professionals into select inner-city neighbourhoods and the distinctiveness of Canadian cities from their US counterparts. These approaches have ignored the role of structural economic change in producing high levels of unemployment as manufacturing jobs have left the inner city. This paper measures the relative strength of these opposing forces within the Canadian urban system by examining changes in inner-city deprivation levels between 1981 and 1991 for the 22 largest cities. The study found evidence of increasing divergence in deprivation levels at the inter-city and intra-city levels but these could not be attributed to structural economic change; instead, local factors appear to be major determinants of overall inner-city conditions.