Sunday December 24, 2006
Rural Canadians called “second class citizens”
According to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, I\’m an endangered species.
They didn\’t refer specifically to me, of course. They didn\’t even interview me. The committee\’s report, called “Understanding Freefall,” examined poverty in rural Canada. It concluded that Canadians who live outside major urban areas are “second class citizens” in their own country. We are in decline; we may even be in danger of extinction.
“We\’ve gone from being one of the most rural countries in the world to one of the most urbanized in something like 60 years,” said Senator Hugh Segal, the person who suggested that the Senate examine rural Canada.
The Senate committee report notes, “Canada\’s rural poor have rarely been the subject of political attention.” And, “The rural poor are under-researched.”
I\’d put it more strongly – Canada has been so fascinated by its cities that it has ignored its rural realities.
A century ago, roughly 80 per cent of Canadians lived in rural settings, just 20 per cent in cities. Today, those proportions have reversed.
Progressive collapse
Like climate change, privatization, and the collapse of ocean fisheries, the steady decline of rural life has developed its own momentum.
“You go to any small town,” said Debbie Frost of the National Anti-Poverty Organization. “Stores are shutting down, banks are closing branches, hospitals are shut down, whole towns are closing up shop. There\’s nothing left for people anymore. So they move to the cities.”
In Alberta, a few years ago, I visited a crossroads where only two families still lived. “It used to be a thriving community,” a mother told me. “We had a great community life.”
But they were moving to Red Deer next month. The grain elevator, the community\’s only remaining employer, was closing.
The prairie provinces used to have 6,000 grain elevators – at least one in almost every town. Now there are fewer than 600.
And it\’s not just the prairies that are suffering. In Ontario, an elderly widow lamented, “First they shut our cheese factory. Then they bused our children away to school. Then the post office closed. Now they\’re closing our church. Why would anyone stay here?”
The Senate report was, theoretically at least, about rural poverty.
“The rural poor,” says the report, “are, in many ways, invisible. They don\’t beg for change. They don\’t congregate in downtown cores. They rarely line up at homeless shelters because with few exceptions, there are none. They rarely go to the local employment insurance office because the local employment insurance office is not so local anymore. They rarely complain about their plight because that is just not the way things are done in rural Canada.”
Chosen lifestyle
That description does not apply only to the poor. It fits most of us living in what city folks think of as the boondocks.
I live in one of those rural communities. My house is about seven kilometres off the highway.
There might be, at most, 200 households in this village. About the only thing we have in common is that we all chose to live here. We like the view, the lifestyle, the atmosphere of this community.
Faced with urban encroachment, a small committee is trying to pull together a plan to preserve the rural lifestyle we value.
As part of the process, we interviewed a variety of residents — newcomers who had lived here less than three years, mid-termers who moved here 8-15 years ago, old-timers who were raised here…
One of the old-timers commented, “We\’re the second generation. Our parents and grandparents were the first generation, but they\’re all gone now.”
I suspect that if we could have interviewed the first generation, the people who first built this community along the shore of Okanagan Lake, they would find our concerns about “preserving the quality of life” bewildering. They had no desire to preserve a frontier atmosphere. They wanted to build a thriving business hub that everyone else came to.
They built a packing house, to which farmers brought apples for shipping to the rest of the world. A wharf, for loading and unloading railway cars from barges. Two hotels. A school. A tennis club. A brothel, which Japanese workers could frequent Tuesday and Thursday evenings. A store. A church. A community hall.
In the mining towns of the Kootenays, the first generation re-shaped their environment even more aggressively. Sandon channelled Carpenter Creek through a culvert and built their main street on top, thus creating room in a narrow valley for seven hotels!
Steering a juggernaut To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to [email protected].
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
Our committee hopes its plan can influence the impact of urbanization. But juggernauts tend to crush attempts to control them. Even the principles of Smart Growth take for granted that urban centres will expand into rural environments. Smart Growth merely attempts to minimize the impact by forcing homes and businesses into small high-density clusters.
As a parallel, imagine sacrificing parts of Stanley Park in Vancouver, or Central Park in New York, for a condominium complex — to preserve what\’s left.
What rural people really want, I suggest, is to be left alone. Without urban planners dictating what to build and how to build it. Without paying taxes to finance urban expressways or sewer systems. Without remote bureaucrats requiring them to register weapons to reduce urban shootings.
I\’m against all guns, personally. But I also oppose “one-size-fits-all” regulations that somehow equate rural gun ownership with urban crime.
The Senate committee\’s sudden interest in rural life reflects a recurring pattern – we rarely value something until it is disappearing.
Rural life thus joins the Yangtze River dolphin, old growth forests, and the nuclear family as artefacts that various groups in our society struggle to save, or rescue, before they become extinct.
Statistics Canada states that Canada\’s rural population is steadily shrinking – both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total population.
How long before we too vanish?
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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