Beyond Freefall: Halting Rural Poverty

the final report of the  Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry details the many issues evident across rural Canada. 

Click here for the entire 408 page PDF copy of the report

Some excerpts:

Implicit in all of this is that urban Canada’s prosperity is somehow detached from rural Canada and yet, the evidence shows that the fates of these two solitudes are very much intertwined. Rural Canada is where we produce the vast agricultural (grains and oilseeds, livestock, pulses, eggs, poultry and dairy) mineral (aluminum, coal, potash, nickel, gold, iron and diamonds), forestry (hardwood and softwood lumber, pulp and paper products), fisheries (lobster, crab, shrimp, salmon, groundfish, and artic char) and energy (oil, natural gas, biofuel, hydro and wind power) wealth that pulses through our urban centres. Our nation’s most efficient producers, and indeed many of our best known national champions, were founded in rural Canada, including for example Bombardier (Valcour, Québec), Irving Oil (Bouctouche, New Brunswick), McCain Foods Limited (Florenceville, New Brunswick), Mouvement des caisses Desjardins (Lévis, Québec), and Tembec Inc. (Témiscaming, Québec).

The committee’s recommendations are premised on five guiding principles that should shape any future iterations of rural policy, namely that

1. Policy Needs to Respect Rural Diversity: Policy needs to recognize that, in the words of Harry Cummings, Professor, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph, “rural is not an absolute but a continuum. Canada’s policy needs to reflect that” (Evidence, October 31, 2006).

2. Policy Needs to Help Those Who Help Themselves: Higher levels of government must use their scarce fiscal capacity judiciously, choosing to focus assistance on communities that demonstrate a willingness to help themselves through long-range strategic visions, leadership and broad-based community support and which have a realistic chance of achieving their goals.

3. Policy Needs to be Place-Based: The committee believes that policy needs to be place-based, a notion that embodies the idea that one size does not fit all and that recognizes the great diversity of rural Canada. Place-based thinking puts emphasis on the idea that local people can come up with local solutions that capitalize on local assets and local enthusiasm. The role of higher levels of government, as stressed in our interim report, must be to facilitate and not dictate policy.

4. Policy Needs to Recognize that Rural Canada Doesn’t Necessarily Want to be Urbanized: We have to guard against the kind of thinking and policies that are premised, implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, on the belief that rural Canada’s problems are best addressed through policies that accelerate the merger of rural communities into urban ones, thereby erasing the former in favour of the latter. Rural and urban Canada must be better integrated, but not at the expense of an outright takeover by urban areas.

5. Rural Policy Needs to Stop Looking for Magic Bullet Solutions: If rural Canada, and especially resource-based rural Canada, is to break free from the vicious cycle of decline that has characterized so much of its recent history, policymakers must give up on the search for “magic bullet” solutions.

From CFC ...

Committee challenges government to act quickly on rural reform

OTTAWA (June 17, 2008) -- The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry has tabled a report on rural poverty that lays out a sweeping set of recommendations on rural reform that should be, ‘on the top of the national policy agenda.’

At the forefront of the committee’s report, Beyond Freefall: Halting Rural Poverty, is a proposal to create a Department of Rural Affairs whose mandate would be to represent the interests of rural Canada at cabinet and drive the implementation of many of the report’s recommendations. One of its first tasks would be to move 10% of the public service out of the big cities and into the regions.

Other recommendations include a proposal for a green paper on a guaranteed annual income and the immediate development of a national forest strategy to deal with the massive layoffs and mill closures that have been occurring in the forest sector.

“We didn’t reach these conclusions lightly,” said committee Chair Joyce Fairbairn. “The report was two years in the making. We met with rural policy experts and hundreds of rural Canadians in legions halls and church basements across Canada, in all provinces and territories. And based on their testimony we believe there is a crisis of decline and poverty in rural Canada that will have a lasting and dangerous impact on all of us if the government does not move quickly to address these problems.”

The picture painted by rural Canadians of the decline and poverty in their communities is a sombre one. Rural populations are becoming progressively smaller – the latest Census showed rural Canada’s share of the national population dropping to below 20% for the first time in the country’s history -- and most of the resource based industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing are in decline. Young people are leaving rural Canada for school or work in the cities and not returning. Meanwhile, those left behind – mostly seniors – watch as schools, churches and businesses close down around them.

“Rural Canadians will find no surprises in this report,” said Senator Leonard Gustafson, Deputy Chair of the committee and a grain farmer from Saskatchewan. “But urban Canadians and federal government managers are going to be profoundly shocked. Not only will they be distressed by the extent of the rural deterioration that needs to be addressed immediately, they will be dismayed that they did not see this coming. It is time to rebuild rural Canada”

Included in the 68 recommendations in the report, the committee also recommended that:

- Farmers should be compensated for providing environmental stewardship services. A revised version of the Farm Families Options Program should also be developed to bring enhanced income stability to low-income farmers;

- The government create a national poverty reduction strategy that is sensitive to the rural /urban divide;
The Canada Child Tax Benefit and the Working Income Tax benefit be enhanced;

- Enhanced support for rural education be provided through: a new early learning and childhood education program sensitive to rural realities; resources for cooperative vocational schools in rural Canada; students loans and grants funding sensitive to rural needs; more university and college programs in rural Canada and enhanced funding for adult literacy programs

- The government create a permanent Rural Health Human Resources Initiative with funding for tele-health, rural-based health education and the restoration of the Office of Rural Health

“Our economy is rooted in Rural Canada, said Senator Fairbairn. “It produces food, fuel, energy and building materials for our cities and for export around the world. As a nation we have been watching the international food and oil crises and the economic downturn with concern. How well we weather these difficult times will depend largely on the resilience of rural Canadians. And they have been dangerously neglected. It is time to give something back to those who have made our country strong.”