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Allan Thompson grew up on a farm, so it made sense for the Carleton University professor to return for last fall’s federal election and run in his old stomping grounds.
But he noticed a funny thing while running as a Liberal in the Huron-Bruce riding: Modern political parties don’t need rural votes as much as they used to, because they win or lose mostly in the cities.
His uncomfortable conclusion? Rural voters themselves don’t matter a lot, either.
“With the last redistribution of ridings federally, it is now very, very possible to win majority governments in this country without (winning) a significant number of rural ridings,” he said. “That changes the focus, changes the stratagem for political parties if it’s clear to them that it’s critical to win the urban centres.”
Allan Thompson: Do rural votes still matter?
It’s a shift in influence that Lisa MacLeod sees, too. The outspoken Conservative MPP from Nepean-Carleton says the Liberals hold nearly all of Ontario’s urban seats, and the opposition holds nearly all the rural ones.
The result: Urban seats give the Liberals a majority in the legislature. Cities win elections.
“You look at it and it’s quite stark,” MacLeod says. “It is becoming more accentuated.”
The main reason: city growth. In Pierre Trudeau’s final term, the Commons had 264 seats. It grew to 282 under Brian Mulroney, to 308 under Stephen Harper, and in October it jumped by another 30 seats (nearly 10 per cent) to 338. This adds up to 74 more seats in the generation from one Trudeau to another — most of them urban, reflecting population growth patterns.
Rural people are being left behind economically at the same time as they are being left behind politically. Within Ontario, “We have two provinces, essentially,” says Wayne Caldwell, who teaches about rural development at the University of Guelph.
“We have a province of growth (in cities) and a province that is struggling to maintain its population, if not declining,” in rural communities.
Related
The sense of powerlessness grows as Smiths Falls loses its Hershey and Stanley Tools plants, Kemptville loses its agriculture college, Nestlé leaves Winchester (back in 2005), and farther away Heinz abandons its ketchup plant in Leamington, while auto plants in small centres such as St. Thomas and Goderich fall like dominoes. (The former Heinz plant is running under new owners, with fewer jobs.)
City people and country people have always been different — the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse — but the nature of this balance is changing in Ontario, and in many parts of Canada. And don’t think they haven’t noticed in places such as Elizabethtown-Kitley Township, the countryside south of Smiths Falls, where a group of residents recently sat around a table to tell a city newspaper why the big issue is not the LRT or federal government transparency, but electricity.
Yes, ordinary power from your wall socket — a “who cares” item for many in Ottawa, but a big source of worry in the country.
A Hydro One smart meter.
Lynn Kerr paid $1,300 in a single month this summer for the Hydro One bill at her combined store and gas station in the village of Toledo, south of Smiths Falls. Typical, she says.
Ellie Renaud is a farmer with the same problem of high energy costs: “I just wrote the cheque out for my mother, who is 90 years old, and her hydro bill for one month: $320.38. She’s 90, lives by herself. In the wintertime, it’s usually more,” even though she heats with wood.
Ashley Rankie grew up in the township, lived in Burlington for a while, and recently moved back with her husband and their two preschool children.
“It was really striking when we were renovating our house,” she said. “We weren’t living in it. We were only using power on one cord, one outlet. We were still paying $6 for actual usage and $80 for delivery and taxes. Like, what is that? When I was living in Burlington, my delivery charge was (about) $15 — for two months. This (the bill here) was for one month. Oh my gosh, this isn’t sustainable.”
Electricity can be a budget-breaker in non-urban areas, which are served by Hydro One. Rates are higher because there are fewer customers spread over many kilometres of wires, and customers also bear a greater share of “line loss” — the fact that some electricity is lost when transmitted over long distances. (Customers pay for what Hydro One sends out, not for the amount they receive.)
So when Premier Kathleen Wynne told reporters she would also like to see people heating with electricity, it played badly here.
And while city people are often in favour of “green” energy from wind or solar power, these technologies upset a lot of rural residents. The group in Elizabethtown-Kitley sees it as a way to add high-priced power (some smaller producers get 80 cents per kilowatt hour, versus 6.9 cents for nuclear plants and 4.4 cents for big hydroelectric plants.) And in Kingston and west along the Great Lakes, bitter disputes over wind turbines more than 100 metres tall have split communities and driven some residents out. Still, clean power is a feel-good message that sells well in urban Canada, where no one ever has to look at a turbine or feel the spooky “shadow flicker” as towering blades cross in front of the sun, like a light switch that can’t stay on or off.
Gasoline prices hurt, too, in a region where people drive long distances. Ontario wants more of us to take the bus, but on County Road 29? Forget it.
So does a rural problem of high energy prices matter? Many who live outside Ontario’s cities feel their issues are not city issues and, consequently, that their issues don’t matter to anyone in power.
Jim Pickard is the township mayor, and while he doesn’t mind the values of ordinary city dwellers he does worry about the attitudes of Ontario’s downtown-Toronto bureaucracy.
An example: Legislation has limited the sprawl of Toronto into surrounding farmland. That’s fine with him. But the same growth-limiting rule is applied to Elizabethtown-Kitley, which actually lost 4.7 per cent of its population from 2006 to 2011. It prevents Ellie Renaud from selling a half-acre of rocky, unfarmable land to someone who wants to build a house.
Eleanor Renaud can’t sell a half-acre of land because of a law she and her neighbours say is Toronto-centric. Tony Caldwell
“That’s Toronto-centric. It’s not the reality here,” Pickard says. The law meant to protect farmland is in places protecting bare rock. He calls the approach “a made-in-Toronto solution.”
“One size does not fit all and they (planners at Queen’s Park) haven’t got that.”
Pickard says rural Ontario’s conservatism is a matter of tradition and heritage rather than specific political issues.
“In the rural environment, it was the land that determined where you are going to live,” he said.
Kitley was settled in 1786, neighbouring Elizabethtown in 1784.
“They were hewers of wood and drawers of water, literally. It was land grants to the Irish and the ex-military that got this started. You had to live off the land. The land provided for you, and that mindset as to how you grow a business is a very conservative mindset. You are at the mercy of Mother Nature, particularly in farming,” and it makes people “tight with a dollar.”
“There’s a conservatism there and I think it’s alive and well, particularly in Eastern Ontario. And I’m not even a farmer.
“You don’t expect to be fed by a government agency. You do it on your own, you’re proud of what you do, and you go to work every day and there’s a risk factor involved. … Those values translate into politics, and that is what the Conservatives have tapped into.”
Paradoxically, the loyalty to one party may result in many rural ridings being overlooked by the party they vote for, says Cristine de Clercy, a political science professor at Western University.
A riding that is too loyal to one party will be taken for granted, she said. Parties will instead pour their promises and campaign resources into a swing riding.
“A lot of the recent elections have been decided in the cities because the city ridings have been largely the ones that have flipped,” she said. “Parties do tend to take their traditional rural ridings for granted,” whatever the party.
She agrees there’s a gradual shift of seats to cities and suburbs. Her solution: a rural caucus within a party.
“Politics is all about numbers. So the rural voters are going to be marginalized if they allow themselves to be treated as independent ridings. But if they can organize into a group, they will have a lot more influence around the table,” she said.
“That said, there is the reality that over time the number of rural ridings is shrinking, and that is just a function of population growth.”
A caucus could even cross party lines, she said. It’s part of “the beauty of the Parliamentary system” that it’s flexible: MPPs can change parties.
“You can never discount the fact that you could have a caucus revolt. A section of their party could say: Sod you, you have taken us for granted, we’re out of here.”
This has even happened, she argues, when the Bloc Québécois lost the support of its rural faithful when they felt taken for granted. The Bloc hasn’t recovered. It won 10 of Quebec’s 74 seats in October, behind all three major parties.
So, what other issues matter to Ottawa’s rural neighbours?
There’s a unique rural perspective on health.
Doctors keep leaving small communities. A family doctor in Athens — “wonderful doctor, everybody loved him,” says Kerr — has just left the area. It’s a story that repeats from town to town across rural Ontario. It’s common for towns to offer a bonus of $100,000 to a young doctor starting his or her career who will agree to stay for five years. Extras such as free office space sweeten the deal — but the doctors often move on before the five years are up, giving up part of the bonus.
The cycle starts again as a newcomer signs on, telling everyone how wonderful it is to live in a small community with fresh air. For now.
“Although 20% of Canadians live in rural communities, only 10% of the country’s family physicians practise in these areas,” according to a 2009 study from the University of Western Ontario’s medical school.
Specialists are far away. A chronic condition can require hundreds of kilometres of driving a week.
And rural Ontarians often aren’t as healthy as urbanites. The University of Guelph’s Caldwell: “It’s partly the long distance from the nearest major hospital, but also lifestyle. My brother farms and a century ago he would have walked behind a horse but today he sits in a tractor all day.”
Drug use plagues rural areas, studies have shown.
Illegal drug use has a rural pattern. Rural young people take more drugs than city kids, says the long-running (since 1977) Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, last updated in 2015. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health sums it up: “Rural high school students are more likely than non-rural students to drink, binge drink, smoke cigarettes and e-cigarettes, use an illicit drug, and are more likely to be a passenger with a driver who had used alcohol/drugs. These differences remain even after controlling for foreign-born vs. born in Canada.”
Eleanor Renaud and her grandchildren, Maddison and Jack, on her 1,000-acre farm outside Jasper, Ont.
What don’t city people know about food production?
“You should ask what do they know,” says Pickard, “because that’s a shorter list.”
Renaud, the farmer: “You don’t want to say they’re ignorant, but they are when it comes to where their food comes from, how it’s grown, that sort of thing.”
Viewed from the city, the farmers in particular are either quaint, jolly peasants in straw hats, or industrial-scale pillagers of the land. There’s rarely middle ground. Farm campaigns such as the defiant “Farmers Feed Cities” bumper stickers have done nothing to change this.
It doesn’t help that they park by the road and picnic on Renaud’s property without asking and explore the grounds. “They don’t stop and think: Well that’s somebody’s front yard. And if you just drove down some street in the city and saw some beautiful front yard and decided to stop and have a picnic…”
Her family began with mixed farming in the 1800s. When she grew up it was a dairy farm. Now she has a cow-calf operation (producing calves that are sold to a feedlot to be raised for beef) and grows corn, beans, grains and hay, all on 1,000 acres. Her boyfriend raises vegetables.
This is your food, but it is politicized as never before.
“People talk GMO. They have no idea what GMO is but somebody has told them that’s a bad thing. We have been, since the beginning of time, altering crops,” she says — by selecting the best seed, by creating hybrids, by grafting a branch of one apple onto another variety’s tree.
Modern technology allows scientists to select individual genes instead of going slowly with hybrids, she says, “and that’s a bad thing?
“They think all GMO is bad. Really, really terrible. They think all pesticides and herbicides are bad.”
If business wears an individual face here, so does poverty. There are no visibly homeless people on street corners, but there are children going to school hungry and people in substandard homes who can’t afford heat.
Ashley Rankie: “A lot of my friends growing up were very impoverished. They would come and stay at my house for days on end,” because her family could feed them.
Churches and the community tap into quiet, informal sources of support, Kerr said. “They can help a family out without the family asking, without saying: Do you need help? Because they are going to say No.”
Several voices around the table repeat the phrase: “We take care of our own.”
“It’s not nearly so visible (in the country) but there are all kinds of issues in terms of living in substandard housing,” says Caldwell. “Sometimes it’s the stuff under the surface that is hard to get to. On one hand, in a small community relationships might be stronger; on the other, it’s easier to live in isolation, too.”
Yet public housing is largely a no-go here. Pickard says the township is stopped cold by a provincial policy that such housing, including seniors’ homes, must have urban sewer and water supplies; the whole township is on wells and septic systems. There are also far fewer social services and no transit available far from the city.
Lynn Kerr poses for a photo at her store and gas station in Toledo, Ont.
And there’s access to shopping. Lynn Kerr has been trying for 10 years to get permission to start a small LCBO agency outlet for her store. She believes she meets all the criteria but she hasn’t succeeded yet, and the closest LCBO stores or agencies are in Smiths Falls and Athens. That’s at least 13 kilometres (says the LCBO), or 20 km (says Mapquest.)
Meanwhile, she notes that supermarkets can sell beer and will soon offer wine. An LCBO spokeswoman confirmed these are generally urban stores.
Kerr: “They don’t get the rural concept of having to drive to the city to get a bottle of wine.”
Her store is a social centre as well as a place to shop. “We definitely know when somebody from the city walks into the store,” she adds. Why? “Their mannerisms, when they are taken aback by being spoken to. A local person would jump into the conversation.”
That’s not just bluster or local pride. We give away our origins as soon as we speak, Sali Tagliamonte confirms. She’s a linguist at the University of Toronto who studies Ontario’s subtle but varied dialects.
“The sound systems are different” between city and country speech. “We’re still uncovering what those differences are,” she said. “When you move out of the urban centres into small towns and communities across Ontario you find a real cornucopia of different ways of speaking, different words.”
The night before the interview, a man had stopped at Kerr’s store and mentioned the nearby farms. “He thought they were potato crops all over the place. He came from the city and they were out for a drive and they (plants in the field) were low, and he thought they were potatoes.”
Nope. Soybeans, miles and miles of them. Worth some $2 billion a year in Ontario, they are the province’s most valuable crop, yet millions of people would never recognize them. They’re used in everything from cooking oil to animal feed.
Every region has its issues, its political winners and losers, but the theme running through rural Ontario is one of loss of voice.
“You can’t pass two laws” for different areas, says Ellie Renaud. “But you can, when you’re passing a law, take it and look at it through a rural lens. And they don’t do that.”
The vacated Hershey plant in Smiths Falls, which has since been taken over by Tweed Inc.
One hidden face of rural Ontario’s tough economy is the decline of manufacturing in small centres.
A research group called the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation put it this way in a report called State of Rural Canada, 2015: “Much of the mainstay of the contemporary rural Ontario economy has been the manufacturing sector. However, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of jobs in that sector over the last number of years.”
A high dollar killed factory jobs that depend on exports, and they haven’t come back, it said.
The recession was too much for many plants. And many were branch plants of multinationals that moved jobs to Mexico as their factories here aged and needed replacement.
The report says trained youth tend to leave for the cities, while few new immigrants take up rural homes: “In 2013, only 1,601 of 105,818 Ontario immigrants settled in non-metro CDs (census districts). Clearly if non-metro Ontario is to maintain its working-age population then it must find a way of attracting and retaining immigrants to their communities, retaining their youth, or otherwise attracting young adults to their communities.”
“We started shedding jobs long before the recession. It has got worse since the recession and it hasn’t come back,” says political scientist Cristine de Clercy at Western University.
When towns lose their manufacturing sector their economies become less diverse and less able to adapt to changing times. “There will be a tipping point, when all of a sudden politicians will come to a realization: Wow! It’s a large problem!”
De Clercy is from Saskatchewan and was surprised to find that Ontario towns were often manufacturing centres when she moved here 10 years ago.
“It’s not yet on the political radar that de-industrialization is a problem. It’s going to affect thousands and thousands of people across Ontario, and it’s going to affect the political calculus.”
“A lot of people in urban centres think that it doesn’t really matter if we empty out small towns,” says Allan Thompson, the Carleton professor from Bruce County.
He now runs a task force called Project Rural, set up by the federal Liberal Party to examine what Ontario’s rural ridings need.
This country needs a diverse economy that stretches beyond major cities, Thompson says, rather than a few areas of strength with gaps in between.
“People don’t always appreciate that rural Canada is part of the fabric of the country. People who live in rural communities deserve economic development and career opportunities and things for young people to do” as much as city dwellers.
Despite the frustrations and the perceived slights, rural residents who spoke to the Citizen aren’t pessimistic about the future. There’s a tenacity and a dedication to a way of life they believe has value.
“I think the future is promising,” says Ashley Rankie. She said she’d like better access to the Internet and affordable electricity but adds that “people who live in the country tend to appreciate what they have.
“I think we are always going to need the country life, or the farm life, and I think it’s just going to grow.”
tspears@postmedia.com
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But he noticed a funny thing while running as a Liberal in the Huron-Bruce riding: Modern political parties don’t need rural votes as much as they used to, because they win or lose mostly in the cities.
His uncomfortable conclusion? Rural voters themselves don’t matter a lot, either.
“With the last redistribution of ridings federally, it is now very, very possible to win majority governments in this country without (winning) a significant number of rural ridings,” he said. “That changes the focus, changes the stratagem for political parties if it’s clear to them that it’s critical to win the urban centres.”
Allan Thompson: Do rural votes still matter?
It’s a shift in influence that Lisa MacLeod sees, too. The outspoken Conservative MPP from Nepean-Carleton says the Liberals hold nearly all of Ontario’s urban seats, and the opposition holds nearly all the rural ones.
The result: Urban seats give the Liberals a majority in the legislature. Cities win elections.
“You look at it and it’s quite stark,” MacLeod says. “It is becoming more accentuated.”
The main reason: city growth. In Pierre Trudeau’s final term, the Commons had 264 seats. It grew to 282 under Brian Mulroney, to 308 under Stephen Harper, and in October it jumped by another 30 seats (nearly 10 per cent) to 338. This adds up to 74 more seats in the generation from one Trudeau to another — most of them urban, reflecting population growth patterns.
Rural people are being left behind economically at the same time as they are being left behind politically. Within Ontario, “We have two provinces, essentially,” says Wayne Caldwell, who teaches about rural development at the University of Guelph.
“We have a province of growth (in cities) and a province that is struggling to maintain its population, if not declining,” in rural communities.
Related
- Ford: Down on the farm, it's not all doom and gloom
- Heartfield: Waving hello and other vagaries of my rural Ottawa
The sense of powerlessness grows as Smiths Falls loses its Hershey and Stanley Tools plants, Kemptville loses its agriculture college, Nestlé leaves Winchester (back in 2005), and farther away Heinz abandons its ketchup plant in Leamington, while auto plants in small centres such as St. Thomas and Goderich fall like dominoes. (The former Heinz plant is running under new owners, with fewer jobs.)
City people and country people have always been different — the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse — but the nature of this balance is changing in Ontario, and in many parts of Canada. And don’t think they haven’t noticed in places such as Elizabethtown-Kitley Township, the countryside south of Smiths Falls, where a group of residents recently sat around a table to tell a city newspaper why the big issue is not the LRT or federal government transparency, but electricity.
Yes, ordinary power from your wall socket — a “who cares” item for many in Ottawa, but a big source of worry in the country.
A Hydro One smart meter.
Lynn Kerr paid $1,300 in a single month this summer for the Hydro One bill at her combined store and gas station in the village of Toledo, south of Smiths Falls. Typical, she says.
Ellie Renaud is a farmer with the same problem of high energy costs: “I just wrote the cheque out for my mother, who is 90 years old, and her hydro bill for one month: $320.38. She’s 90, lives by herself. In the wintertime, it’s usually more,” even though she heats with wood.
Ashley Rankie grew up in the township, lived in Burlington for a while, and recently moved back with her husband and their two preschool children.
“It was really striking when we were renovating our house,” she said. “We weren’t living in it. We were only using power on one cord, one outlet. We were still paying $6 for actual usage and $80 for delivery and taxes. Like, what is that? When I was living in Burlington, my delivery charge was (about) $15 — for two months. This (the bill here) was for one month. Oh my gosh, this isn’t sustainable.”
Electricity can be a budget-breaker in non-urban areas, which are served by Hydro One. Rates are higher because there are fewer customers spread over many kilometres of wires, and customers also bear a greater share of “line loss” — the fact that some electricity is lost when transmitted over long distances. (Customers pay for what Hydro One sends out, not for the amount they receive.)
So when Premier Kathleen Wynne told reporters she would also like to see people heating with electricity, it played badly here.
And while city people are often in favour of “green” energy from wind or solar power, these technologies upset a lot of rural residents. The group in Elizabethtown-Kitley sees it as a way to add high-priced power (some smaller producers get 80 cents per kilowatt hour, versus 6.9 cents for nuclear plants and 4.4 cents for big hydroelectric plants.) And in Kingston and west along the Great Lakes, bitter disputes over wind turbines more than 100 metres tall have split communities and driven some residents out. Still, clean power is a feel-good message that sells well in urban Canada, where no one ever has to look at a turbine or feel the spooky “shadow flicker” as towering blades cross in front of the sun, like a light switch that can’t stay on or off.
Gasoline prices hurt, too, in a region where people drive long distances. Ontario wants more of us to take the bus, but on County Road 29? Forget it.
So does a rural problem of high energy prices matter? Many who live outside Ontario’s cities feel their issues are not city issues and, consequently, that their issues don’t matter to anyone in power.
Jim Pickard is the township mayor, and while he doesn’t mind the values of ordinary city dwellers he does worry about the attitudes of Ontario’s downtown-Toronto bureaucracy.
An example: Legislation has limited the sprawl of Toronto into surrounding farmland. That’s fine with him. But the same growth-limiting rule is applied to Elizabethtown-Kitley, which actually lost 4.7 per cent of its population from 2006 to 2011. It prevents Ellie Renaud from selling a half-acre of rocky, unfarmable land to someone who wants to build a house.
Eleanor Renaud can’t sell a half-acre of land because of a law she and her neighbours say is Toronto-centric. Tony Caldwell
“That’s Toronto-centric. It’s not the reality here,” Pickard says. The law meant to protect farmland is in places protecting bare rock. He calls the approach “a made-in-Toronto solution.”
“One size does not fit all and they (planners at Queen’s Park) haven’t got that.”
Pickard says rural Ontario’s conservatism is a matter of tradition and heritage rather than specific political issues.
“In the rural environment, it was the land that determined where you are going to live,” he said.
Kitley was settled in 1786, neighbouring Elizabethtown in 1784.
“They were hewers of wood and drawers of water, literally. It was land grants to the Irish and the ex-military that got this started. You had to live off the land. The land provided for you, and that mindset as to how you grow a business is a very conservative mindset. You are at the mercy of Mother Nature, particularly in farming,” and it makes people “tight with a dollar.”
“There’s a conservatism there and I think it’s alive and well, particularly in Eastern Ontario. And I’m not even a farmer.
“You don’t expect to be fed by a government agency. You do it on your own, you’re proud of what you do, and you go to work every day and there’s a risk factor involved. … Those values translate into politics, and that is what the Conservatives have tapped into.”
Paradoxically, the loyalty to one party may result in many rural ridings being overlooked by the party they vote for, says Cristine de Clercy, a political science professor at Western University.
A riding that is too loyal to one party will be taken for granted, she said. Parties will instead pour their promises and campaign resources into a swing riding.
“A lot of the recent elections have been decided in the cities because the city ridings have been largely the ones that have flipped,” she said. “Parties do tend to take their traditional rural ridings for granted,” whatever the party.
She agrees there’s a gradual shift of seats to cities and suburbs. Her solution: a rural caucus within a party.
“Politics is all about numbers. So the rural voters are going to be marginalized if they allow themselves to be treated as independent ridings. But if they can organize into a group, they will have a lot more influence around the table,” she said.
“That said, there is the reality that over time the number of rural ridings is shrinking, and that is just a function of population growth.”
A caucus could even cross party lines, she said. It’s part of “the beauty of the Parliamentary system” that it’s flexible: MPPs can change parties.
“You can never discount the fact that you could have a caucus revolt. A section of their party could say: Sod you, you have taken us for granted, we’re out of here.”
This has even happened, she argues, when the Bloc Québécois lost the support of its rural faithful when they felt taken for granted. The Bloc hasn’t recovered. It won 10 of Quebec’s 74 seats in October, behind all three major parties.
So, what other issues matter to Ottawa’s rural neighbours?
Health
There’s a unique rural perspective on health.
Doctors keep leaving small communities. A family doctor in Athens — “wonderful doctor, everybody loved him,” says Kerr — has just left the area. It’s a story that repeats from town to town across rural Ontario. It’s common for towns to offer a bonus of $100,000 to a young doctor starting his or her career who will agree to stay for five years. Extras such as free office space sweeten the deal — but the doctors often move on before the five years are up, giving up part of the bonus.
The cycle starts again as a newcomer signs on, telling everyone how wonderful it is to live in a small community with fresh air. For now.
“Although 20% of Canadians live in rural communities, only 10% of the country’s family physicians practise in these areas,” according to a 2009 study from the University of Western Ontario’s medical school.
Specialists are far away. A chronic condition can require hundreds of kilometres of driving a week.
And rural Ontarians often aren’t as healthy as urbanites. The University of Guelph’s Caldwell: “It’s partly the long distance from the nearest major hospital, but also lifestyle. My brother farms and a century ago he would have walked behind a horse but today he sits in a tractor all day.”
Drug use plagues rural areas, studies have shown.
Drugs
Illegal drug use has a rural pattern. Rural young people take more drugs than city kids, says the long-running (since 1977) Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, last updated in 2015. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health sums it up: “Rural high school students are more likely than non-rural students to drink, binge drink, smoke cigarettes and e-cigarettes, use an illicit drug, and are more likely to be a passenger with a driver who had used alcohol/drugs. These differences remain even after controlling for foreign-born vs. born in Canada.”
Agriculture
Eleanor Renaud and her grandchildren, Maddison and Jack, on her 1,000-acre farm outside Jasper, Ont.
What don’t city people know about food production?
“You should ask what do they know,” says Pickard, “because that’s a shorter list.”
Renaud, the farmer: “You don’t want to say they’re ignorant, but they are when it comes to where their food comes from, how it’s grown, that sort of thing.”
Viewed from the city, the farmers in particular are either quaint, jolly peasants in straw hats, or industrial-scale pillagers of the land. There’s rarely middle ground. Farm campaigns such as the defiant “Farmers Feed Cities” bumper stickers have done nothing to change this.
It doesn’t help that they park by the road and picnic on Renaud’s property without asking and explore the grounds. “They don’t stop and think: Well that’s somebody’s front yard. And if you just drove down some street in the city and saw some beautiful front yard and decided to stop and have a picnic…”
Her family began with mixed farming in the 1800s. When she grew up it was a dairy farm. Now she has a cow-calf operation (producing calves that are sold to a feedlot to be raised for beef) and grows corn, beans, grains and hay, all on 1,000 acres. Her boyfriend raises vegetables.
This is your food, but it is politicized as never before.
“People talk GMO. They have no idea what GMO is but somebody has told them that’s a bad thing. We have been, since the beginning of time, altering crops,” she says — by selecting the best seed, by creating hybrids, by grafting a branch of one apple onto another variety’s tree.
Modern technology allows scientists to select individual genes instead of going slowly with hybrids, she says, “and that’s a bad thing?
“They think all GMO is bad. Really, really terrible. They think all pesticides and herbicides are bad.”
Poverty
If business wears an individual face here, so does poverty. There are no visibly homeless people on street corners, but there are children going to school hungry and people in substandard homes who can’t afford heat.
Ashley Rankie: “A lot of my friends growing up were very impoverished. They would come and stay at my house for days on end,” because her family could feed them.
Churches and the community tap into quiet, informal sources of support, Kerr said. “They can help a family out without the family asking, without saying: Do you need help? Because they are going to say No.”
Several voices around the table repeat the phrase: “We take care of our own.”
“It’s not nearly so visible (in the country) but there are all kinds of issues in terms of living in substandard housing,” says Caldwell. “Sometimes it’s the stuff under the surface that is hard to get to. On one hand, in a small community relationships might be stronger; on the other, it’s easier to live in isolation, too.”
Yet public housing is largely a no-go here. Pickard says the township is stopped cold by a provincial policy that such housing, including seniors’ homes, must have urban sewer and water supplies; the whole township is on wells and septic systems. There are also far fewer social services and no transit available far from the city.
Lynn Kerr poses for a photo at her store and gas station in Toledo, Ont.
Shopping
And there’s access to shopping. Lynn Kerr has been trying for 10 years to get permission to start a small LCBO agency outlet for her store. She believes she meets all the criteria but she hasn’t succeeded yet, and the closest LCBO stores or agencies are in Smiths Falls and Athens. That’s at least 13 kilometres (says the LCBO), or 20 km (says Mapquest.)
Meanwhile, she notes that supermarkets can sell beer and will soon offer wine. An LCBO spokeswoman confirmed these are generally urban stores.
Kerr: “They don’t get the rural concept of having to drive to the city to get a bottle of wine.”
Her store is a social centre as well as a place to shop. “We definitely know when somebody from the city walks into the store,” she adds. Why? “Their mannerisms, when they are taken aback by being spoken to. A local person would jump into the conversation.”
That’s not just bluster or local pride. We give away our origins as soon as we speak, Sali Tagliamonte confirms. She’s a linguist at the University of Toronto who studies Ontario’s subtle but varied dialects.
“The sound systems are different” between city and country speech. “We’re still uncovering what those differences are,” she said. “When you move out of the urban centres into small towns and communities across Ontario you find a real cornucopia of different ways of speaking, different words.”
The night before the interview, a man had stopped at Kerr’s store and mentioned the nearby farms. “He thought they were potato crops all over the place. He came from the city and they were out for a drive and they (plants in the field) were low, and he thought they were potatoes.”
Nope. Soybeans, miles and miles of them. Worth some $2 billion a year in Ontario, they are the province’s most valuable crop, yet millions of people would never recognize them. They’re used in everything from cooking oil to animal feed.
Every region has its issues, its political winners and losers, but the theme running through rural Ontario is one of loss of voice.
“You can’t pass two laws” for different areas, says Ellie Renaud. “But you can, when you’re passing a law, take it and look at it through a rural lens. And they don’t do that.”
The vacated Hershey plant in Smiths Falls, which has since been taken over by Tweed Inc.
Manufacturing
One hidden face of rural Ontario’s tough economy is the decline of manufacturing in small centres.
A research group called the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation put it this way in a report called State of Rural Canada, 2015: “Much of the mainstay of the contemporary rural Ontario economy has been the manufacturing sector. However, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of jobs in that sector over the last number of years.”
A high dollar killed factory jobs that depend on exports, and they haven’t come back, it said.
The recession was too much for many plants. And many were branch plants of multinationals that moved jobs to Mexico as their factories here aged and needed replacement.
The report says trained youth tend to leave for the cities, while few new immigrants take up rural homes: “In 2013, only 1,601 of 105,818 Ontario immigrants settled in non-metro CDs (census districts). Clearly if non-metro Ontario is to maintain its working-age population then it must find a way of attracting and retaining immigrants to their communities, retaining their youth, or otherwise attracting young adults to their communities.”
“We started shedding jobs long before the recession. It has got worse since the recession and it hasn’t come back,” says political scientist Cristine de Clercy at Western University.
When towns lose their manufacturing sector their economies become less diverse and less able to adapt to changing times. “There will be a tipping point, when all of a sudden politicians will come to a realization: Wow! It’s a large problem!”
De Clercy is from Saskatchewan and was surprised to find that Ontario towns were often manufacturing centres when she moved here 10 years ago.
“It’s not yet on the political radar that de-industrialization is a problem. It’s going to affect thousands and thousands of people across Ontario, and it’s going to affect the political calculus.”
“A lot of people in urban centres think that it doesn’t really matter if we empty out small towns,” says Allan Thompson, the Carleton professor from Bruce County.
He now runs a task force called Project Rural, set up by the federal Liberal Party to examine what Ontario’s rural ridings need.
This country needs a diverse economy that stretches beyond major cities, Thompson says, rather than a few areas of strength with gaps in between.
“People don’t always appreciate that rural Canada is part of the fabric of the country. People who live in rural communities deserve economic development and career opportunities and things for young people to do” as much as city dwellers.
Despite the frustrations and the perceived slights, rural residents who spoke to the Citizen aren’t pessimistic about the future. There’s a tenacity and a dedication to a way of life they believe has value.
“I think the future is promising,” says Ashley Rankie. She said she’d like better access to the Internet and affordable electricity but adds that “people who live in the country tend to appreciate what they have.
“I think we are always going to need the country life, or the farm life, and I think it’s just going to grow.”
tspears@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/Tomspears1
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