It’s a challenge small communities across the country have faced for decades: how to convince young people to stay.
For many, the lure of the city is irresistible, with greater career and educational opportunities, and copious options for entertainment and sports.
The hustle and bustle of the city, coupled with the larger youth populations that live there has, for decades, drawn young people away from Canada’s small communities.
I grew up in a city of about 60,000 outside of Edmonton, a bedroom community that, in traffic, takes about 15 minutes to drive across in any given direction. While hardly comparable in size to a small town, it’s still hard to go somewhere in my hometown without running into at least one person I know.
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As a kid, finding things to do, particularly when we didn’t have our driver’s licences, was challenging. It is a boredom familiar to youth everywhere. (As a teenager, the swimming pool, the library, and the now-shuttered dive of a movie theatre were staples on the local social scene.)
There were always plenty of things to do if you were under the age of 12. Cool activities, classes, and drop-in sports at the local community and recreation centres were always on offer — opportunities that re-emerged when you became an adult.
Not so much, though, if you fell in between the ages of 13 and 17. This also happens to be the time when most of us feel like we’re “too cool” for pretty much everything. It’s an attitude that has been known to drive teachers and parents crazy since the beginning of time.
Unfortunately, those years are also critical for developing a connection to one’s hometown.
After-school sports teams and other extracurricular activities helped fill much of the void and kept us out of trouble, for the most part. Still, I remember bored conversations with friends about how most of us couldn’t wait to “get out of this place.”
A lot of us did.
A decade later, many of my classmates and I are scattered across the country and the world. Most of our careers and dreams have landed us in communities much larger than our hometown.
And, as much as I hate to admit it (I love my hometown, I really do), hardly any of us, myself included, talk of moving back.
It’s a pattern Ontario’s rural communities are trying to change.
Community leaders, business leaders and politicians, including Ontario’s Agriculture Minister Jeff Leal, gathered in Stratford recently for the third annual Rural Ontario Summit.
The goal: brainstorm ways to convince young people to stay.
Education, training opportunities, jobs, entrepreneurship, social infrastructure, internet access, improved transportation and civic leadership were all up for discussion as community leaders grappled with how to convince the younger generation that rural communities are viable places to call home.
Quite simply, youth are the future. Without them, rural Ontario faces much uncertainty.
At the heart of the conversation is Ontario’s agriculture industry, an industry in which ongoing investments in innovation and technology will help lure the next generation.
Premier Kathleen Wynne has challenged the sector to create 120,000 jobs by the year 2020 and double its annual growth rate.
Leal has repeatedly insisted that goal is achievable. Since 2013, 34,000 new jobs have been created in rural Ontario, along with a 1.6 percent bump in the agrifood sector’s gross domestic product.
Exposing young people to these opportunities is critical.
Meanwhile, industry leaders point to growing demand for local food and craft beer, which coincidentally, are increasingly popular with younger Canadians.
In today’s fast-paced and increasingly globalized world, competing against the lure of major metropolises can be a challenge for any community. For rural communities, those difficulties can seem nearly insurmountable.
Still, it should not be seen as an impossible task, particularly when it’s being tackled by folks whose hearts and souls are the essence of their communities in the first place.
