SASKATOON – Many in the audience squirmed and fidgeted as three academics talked about rural survival.
The crowd asked questions and buttonholed the speakers at the Prairie Ecosystem Study conference last week in an effort to inject a human element in the statistics.
Doug Dale from Craik, Sask., was eager to explain how rural people felt betrayed with health reform. Nikki Gerrard of Saskatoon said the competition factor in sports rivalry keeps rural towns strong. Others in the audience asked if the data has different impacts on men and women and wondered if trends were good or bad.
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PECOS is a project of the University of Saskat-chewan that studies an area of the province north of Swift Current under various themes such as sociology, biology, economics and agriculture to explore how that region survives.
Agricultural economist Rose Olfert told PECOS participants and students that most small towns and villages in Saskatchewan have lost business to the 10 largest cities. This pattern of consolidation is neither unique to Saskatchewan, nor would she call it good or bad.
“You can’t tell people they’re wrong to go shop in Saskatoon,” she told one questioner. The important thing, she said, is whether people can manage their community’s change in a sensible way.
“If we want to have some strong rural communities they won’t all be performing the same functions. Intercommunity co-operation means tradeoffs.”
Olfert said people must say to themselves “the high school won’t be in my town, but the hospital might.”
In an interview, Olfert said peoples’ attitudes and local leadership ability are clearly important to a town’s survival. These are not the sole reasons for success but they are necessary, she said.
While municipalities are being urged to merge, Olfert said redrawing boundaries may not be necessary.
“People have a strong aversion to merger. They have some good points – it gives them less local control. But municipalities realize that to get state-of-the-art firefighting,” for example, they can only afford it if they band together to share the costs and services.
As governments back out of providing services and globalization pushes Canadians to compete with the world, the response has been community action, said Murray Fulton, director of the U of S Centre for the Study of Co-operatives.
Community involvement
While individualism and competition may be the impetus to start projects such as a pasta plant, Fulton said entrepreneurial farmers soon realize their well-being depends on the collective response of the community. If no one grows durum or delivers it to that facility, then the plant will fail.
The need for the competitive to understand they can get further ahead by co-operation also was a theme of the presentation by Stephen Lewis, executive director of Saskatchewan’s Health Services Utilization and Research Commission.
He disagreed that losing hospitals and other institutions killed small towns. He argued that rural citizens were overserved and were driving past local facilities anyway to get what they wanted in the cities.
Lewis said community care with service at home is the key to a rural health system. Now the burden of that care is borne by women, typically an elderly woman looking after an even older man. Saskatchewan spends over $500 million a year on hospital and acute care and only $60 million on home care.
“I don’t know what the ideal ratio is,” said Lewis, but people must start analyzing the most effective use of their health dollars.
He suggested winning health strategies for small communities include: Developing a group practice for doctors; supporting the concept of nurses doing more responsible medical work; recognizing that wellness, not sickness, keeps dollars at home; becoming experts in the science of aging; and “recognizing a naked emperor when you see one.”
