NETTIE Wiebe calls what is happening to the rural landscape of Western Canada “de-development.”
The University of Saskatchewan theology school professor, former National Farmers Union president and 2004 NDP candidate has been involved in international farm politics and has seen international development projects first-hand.
“Everybody agrees that rural development in developing countries involves building infrastructure, putting in roads, putting in schools and hospitals, providing services that will make it possible for people to stay in rural areas,” she said.
“That’s how international development works. I’ve never heard anyone from CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) or foreign affairs say they have changed the development model.”
Read Also
VIDEO: New drone carrier wins ag tech innovation award
PhiBer’s trailer to land, recharge and refil four drones won the ag tech award at the innovation program for Ag in Motion 2025.
Yet when she surveys the rural areas of her own region of Canada, she sees the opposite happening.
“For decades now, and escalating in the past decade, there has been a systematic pulling out of services from rural areas – railroads, elevators, post offices, hospitals,” she said.
“It is the opposite of development. It seems appropriate to label it de-development.”
She sees it as fallout from a combination of rural poverty and government or corporate ideology that sees a concentration of services at central points as economic efficiency.
“Serving a thinly populated rural area does not fit their economic efficiency model.”
Darrin Qualman, her former colleague at the NFU, offers a cinematic image.
“If you ran a film of the development of the West, you would see roads being built, railroads, elevators, towns, post offices,” he said.
“Now, the film is being played backwards. Roads and railroads are being ripped up, post offices and hospitals being torn down.”
It is a stark image and one that rural watchers say could be exacerbated by the sorry state of farm income across the country.
“It’s the spin-off from the farm situation that hurts the rural area,” said Neal Hardy, a farmer from Hudson Bay, Sask., and president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities.
“We don’t have money as farmers to buy things, our small local suppliers get pinched and go under, people move away, there are too few to justify a school and so it goes. It has been happening in rural Saskatchewan continuously for years. We’re losing small business in rural Saskatchewan all the time.”
It has been happening elsewhere in rural Canada as well.
When Jim Doyle started farming 30 years ago with his wife Jennifer near Auburn, P.E.I., the cattle, hog and grain farmers had more than 30 neighbours on their road. Now, their farm is one of just three left.
“There has been a real leaving from around here,” Doyle said.
If many more leave, particularly out of the hog sector, the pace of de-development in P.E.I. will likely quicken. During the past decade, more than 250 farmers have left the hog sector and the province’s only hog processor is on the edge of not having enough supply to justify the plant.
“If we lose many more producers, we also could lose the plant and then we have to ship off the island, costs go up and more farmers go out of business,” Doyle said.
Numbers from Saskatchewan starkly illustrate this exodus from rural Canada.
According to the province’s finance department, agricultural employment in Saskatchewan declined by almost 45 percent to a little more than 50,000 workers in 2002 from more than 90,000 workers in 1984. A departmental official said the decrease “can be largely attributed to agriculture becoming an increasingly capital intensive industry and increasing productivity.”
During the five years after 1996, more than 6,000 Saskatchewan farmers left the business, an 11.2 percent decrease to a little more than 50,000 farmers.
A senior provincial government official who did not want to be identified said most of the remaining farmers contribute little to the food supply but much to the demand for public assistance.
“In terms of production, taking out the two-thirds that produce less than one-third of the crops would not hurt the farm economy,” he said.
It would dramatically affect the rural economy, however, and University of Regina economist Garry Tompkins suggested that is the trend and a likely outcome from the income and commodity price collapse.
“I think you will see a lot more people leaving, certainly young people not staying,” he said.
“It is a significant social problem. If the rural economy isn’t good, the entire economy isn’t good and so the people moving out of rural Saskatchewan will not be moving to Regina or Saskatoon. They will be moving out of the province.”
