Report provides rural Canada with road map

Many of Alberta’s smaller communities are struggling with what it means to be rural in the 21st century, says the co-author of a report by the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation.

“I would point out that to me, it’s not all doom and gloom, right?” said Lars Hallstrom, director of the Prentice Institute for Global Population and Economy at the University of Lethbridge.

“There are lots of communities that are kind of falling into the adage of ‘do what you can with what you have,’ and they’re trying to find ways to build their business profile, to diversify, to maintain their services… but I’ll temper that with the reality that it’s often an uphill battle, and for a lot of people just in general, change is hard.”

Economic uncertainty caused by everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to fluctuating oil prices “can really complicate the ability of communities to think about what that change should be, not just for the next year, not just for the next four years — speaking of the (recent) municipal elections — but to think about ‘what does rural Alberta look like in 25 years?’ ”

The foundation, which was established in 1989, recently released its latest report on the state of rural Canada. It made the following five recommendations:

• Invest in rural policy and development by applying a rural lens and supporting the collection and analysis of rural data.
• Support the rural capacity for resilience to enhance and support processes of adaptation.
• Enhance regional collaboration to address shortcomings in policy development and service provision and build on rural assets.
• Take decisive action on truth and reconciliation to support Indigenous self-determination and settler-Indigenous relationships and collaboration.
• Plan for sustainable rural futures by embedding principles of social, economic and environmental justice into rural programs and policies.

“Rural Canada plays an essential role in the social, economic and cultural fabric of this country,” said the report. “As such, all Canadians must be invested in the sustainability and resilience of rural communities.”

Alberta premier Jason Kenney announced July 8 he was appointing Nate Horner, MLA for Drumheller-Stettler, as associate minister of rural economic development. The decision addressed a gap in provincial government priorities that had been “particularly problematic now for almost 10 years,” said Hallstrom, who wrote the Alberta section of the report.

It noted the province had lacked a provincial minister, policy or program for rural development even after “massive electoral majorities in rural ridings” for the governing United Conservative Party in 2019. The report said rural Albertans also haven’t been sheltered from what it called deep cuts to education and health care.

However, the provincial government announced July 22 it planned to spend up to $150 million to upgrade and expand access to broadband internet in rural Alberta, improving access to services for thousands of households.

“I am so excited on behalf of all the people I represent because this does fight crime,” said Paul McLauchlin, president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, as part of the announcement.

“This does deal with health care. This does deal with rural development. This is how you have smart farm, smart ag — this is how you become a world leader, as the premier and the ministers have talked about, and I have to say this is a great day and I will continue to smile today.”

Despite such expectations, Hallstrom said broadband likely isn’t going to be such a panacea in practice. For example, small- to medium-sized businesses that ostensibly will take advantage of it probably aren’t thinking clearly about how it will actually fit into their business model, and rural residents such as older people may not have the skill set to use it, he said.

“It is something that is commonly touted and certainly if you don’t have broadband connectivity, you are kind of dead in the water, but the reality is there are well-identified digital divides that extend beyond just providers and access. It’s about use and usability and user demand, and they’re very intimately coupled.”

Expectations that city residents will flock to rural Alberta due to broadband as part of a pandemic trend of people working from home are likely being overstated, said Hallstrom.

“I think this is where some of the national press was landing, which is COVID might somehow save rural Canada because everybody’s going to the move to the country and work remotely and buy up all these houses. But that was really around a very Ontario-specific understanding of rural in that dynamic — it was really the Toronto metropolitan corridor.”

The more remote parts of rural Alberta will likely continue to face decades-old trends, such as young people moving away to larger urban areas, leaving behind an increasingly smaller group of aging people who are nearing the end of their working lives, he said.

“Communities within about 100 kilometres of larger urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Lethbridge tend to be growing or doing OK… but those that are far, far to the north, or maybe further to east really are struggling (with) of course employment, and the capacity of those communities to support populations and generate incomes to provide services.”

At the same time, rural municipalities across much of Alberta are facing $245 million in total unpaid taxes from oil and gas companies, said the report.

“Rural municipalities look after about 85 percent of the roads in Alberta, or 174,000 kilometres, and about 60 percent of the bridges, or about 8,800, and these lost revenues are often unrecoverable.”

Farmers rely on the rural road network to get their goods to market.

“Canada as a country has diminished its spending on infrastructure significantly since the 1960s as a percentage of (gross domestic product),” said Hallstrom. “Alberta just happened to be home to a really significant chunk of paved roads and significant infrastructure in part to support industry and agriculture.”

Meanwhile, rural municipalities are increasingly being asked “to be responsible for more, and to a degree have a form of accountability for additional elements of land use and biodiversity monitoring, etc.,” he said.

“But they really have no capacity, and in some cases, not even really the authority to do so, so they’re being asked to do more with less and then having other responsibilities devolved down from the province onto them. And so what that points to is some real challenges for whether or not the municipal structure that we have under the Municipal Government Act in this province works.”

Although enhancing regional collaboration as recommended by the report is one solution to the problem, it has always been something of a dicey proposition politically in Alberta, said Hallstrom.

He pointed to Black Diamond and Turner Valley. Several important steps toward amalgamation were recently approved by both town councils after decades of obstacles caused by an historic rivalry between the two communities.

Rural Albertans are also being affected by a long-standing delay in developing and implementing regional land-use plans, as shown by the intense debate over the potential development of open-pit coal mines in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, he said. The region is the headwaters for rivers relied on by everyone from producers to communities across much of Western Canada.

Hallstrom said it is disappointing Alberta isn’t making better use of a land-use framework that was “actually and explicitly” designed to balance the needs of farmers and agriculture with energy development.

“(The) politics of the land-use framework in this province are something in some ways you couldn’t make it up.”