An Alberta government-sponsored report refutes the idea that the entire
province is an oasis in a desert of prairie poverty.
“Rural disparities do exist in Alberta’s economy with many areas,
mostly rural, not participating fully in the Alberta advantage,” said
the draft report Regional Disparities in Alberta: Resource Package.
Mark Parsons of the Alberta economic development department, co-wrote
the report. He said the message was clear.
“You hear all the good news stories of Alberta, but there’s not that
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awareness that Alberta’s prosperity doesn’t necessarily reflect on some
of the areas that aren’t sharing equally.”
The report was commissioned by a government committee to help identify
regions in Alberta that are lagging behind the rest of the province.
Using data from Statistics Canada, the study looked at demographics,
population growth, income, capital investment, agriculture and
infrastructure to see how rural areas fared.
The report shows they are not doing as well as the boom community of
Fort McMurray and the urban corridor along Highway 2 between Edmonton
and Calgary.
With the exception of areas near the Rocky Mountains, all regions
outside the urban corridor report below average income.
Alberta’s income per capita is $21,699, nearly $1,800 above the
Canadian average of $19,920. But disparities came into focus when the
report looked closer at specific areas. Fort McMurray and Calgary had
the highest income, both more than $25,000 income per capita, compared
to Fort Macleod with a little more than $13,000 and Camrose and
Lloydminster with just over $15,000.
East-central Alberta ranked at the bottom, with below average incomes
in all four federal census divisions.
The Camrose-Drumheller area ranked lowest in employment growth. Between
1996 and 2000, Calgary’s employment grew by 20.4 percent compared to
0.2 percent in Camrose and Drumheller.
The report is not a surprise, said Roger Epp, professor of political
economy at Augustana University College in Camrose. He has long
maintained there are two Albertas – the public face of prosperity and
the private face of rural distress.
“It’s kind of hard for a government that trumpets prosperity to admit
to this kind of disparity,” he said.
“There is this official sense we’re all booming here and if you’re not,
how do you say so without sounding like a whiner.”
Horst Schreiber, the Liberal candidate in the recent Wainwright
byelection, said he expected to hear about economic disparity in the
region when he travelled across the eastern Alberta constituency. He
heard little, even though many communities had more vacant commercial
spaces than operating businesses.
“People have been told for so long by the boys in Edmonton that things
are going so well, that they believe if they don’t have it, it’s their
own fault,” the Daysland farmer said.
Glen Werner, Alberta Agriculture’s director of rural development
initiatives, said he worries about the report’s repercussions.
“My fear is the report will be used to say everything in rural Alberta
is going to hell in a sled, and that’s not true, but if you look at
that report, you might want to draw that conclusion.”
The report looks only at economics, and not the social or human
benefits of rural life. It points to a Western Agri-Food Institute
study that show 98 percent of residents in the four western provinces
rated their life as good or very good.
“I would be the first to suggest there is tremendous opportunity in
rural Alberta,” said Werner, who is working on a framework agreement
for a rural development strategy.
“We have tended to accentuate the benefits of the golden corridor.
Businesses have been caught up in the hype of the golden corridor and
have not been aware of some of the benefits of locating outside of that
golden corridor.”
Duff Carroll, manager of the Town of Hanna, said it’s difficult to
attract businesses to rural areas. For six years the town has tried to
use a vacant Alberta Transportation building to lure new businesses.
“You get somebody that might be interested and they say, ‘oh but, I
don’t know whether I can get my people to move out of the city’,”
Carroll said. “If you can get them here, the advantages of rural
Alberta are pretty good.”
Carroll said small towns have given up lobbying government for economic
development help.
“My personal opinion is they
(government officials) really don’t care. We’re in the Special Areas,
it’s so sparsely populated, a large land base with very few people. We
don’t carry a lot of weight.”
The Hanna region’s MLA is agriculture minister and deputy premier
Shirley McClellan.
During a recent speech in the legislature, economic development
minister Mark Norris said the department is working with agriculture to
develop a blueprint to help rural areas.
“The idea of that is to simply say, if you have an idea, a business, or
want to expand one, how do you access all the services that this
government has? Part of the problem quite simply is that sometimes
people aren’t aware of all the good work that we do as a government,
and we want to help with that,” he said.
“As every member of this house now knows, Alberta is slated to lead the
nation in growth for the 11th consecutive year in a row. It should
become obvious … that rural Alberta is a massive part of that.”
