It’s not news that the grain economy matters little to most people outside Western Canada.
But in the new economy focused on technology, grain is also becoming less relevant to people who live in Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton.
There is an “emerging urban heartland” in Western Canada, according to Roger Gibbins, president of Canada West Foundation, a Calgary-based think-tank.
Despite historical low grain prices and economic pain in the rural Prairies, the Alberta economy is booming, Saskatchewan is motoring ahead and Winnipeg’s economy has recently been recognized for its diversity and strength.
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It’s a watershed divide between Western Canadian cities and their country cousins, a gap Gibbins thinks is bound to widen.
“This is a huge change in Western Canada, and as a change, it’s likely to intensify in years to come,” Gibbins told the recent Fields on Wheels conference in Winnipeg.
In the past, the fate of the grain economy determined the region’s economy. Agriculture touched the lives and influenced the prosperity of all. From 1900 to 1930, booming Western Canada was the engine for the Canadian economy.
But the Depression devastated the region and, after the Second World War, the West moved to the margins of the economy and national politics.
Gibbins pointed out the population of Manitoba and Saskatchewan has had a net gain of only a few thousand people since the 1931 census.
But in western cities, it’s a different story.
Urban economies are prosperous and growing. In fact, Western Canada has become the most urbanized region in the country. Cities are growing as the rural population dries up.
“If you look then at the face of the new West, it is an urban face,” said Gibbins.
Socially, culturally, emotionally, urban Westerners have begun to detach themselves from their country cousins.
Gibbins said urbanites feel as distant from their surrounding communities as they do from cities in other parts of Canada, North America or the world. They are less interested in the nearby rural expanse than they are in the nebulous but prosperous global economy, he said.
“This means that city dwellers … are going to be less and less concerned about the state of the regional transportation system or the health of the rural economy,” he said.
The information highway, not provincial roads, attracts more urban interest.
“Who talks about real highways?” said Gibbins.
Western urbanites will be more apt to support $350 million in public funding to broadband networks connecting communities than $350 million in paving for secondary roads, he said.
Western cities are working at differentiating themselves from the region and from competing cities in the new economy, cities like Boise, Idaho, Spokane, Washington or Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Canada West Foundation is working on a major project looking at the role of the five major western cities in the economy, and how they can best position themselves. Gibbins said it will focus on how well cities attract new people and businesses, and keep the ones they have.
One factor to consider is the cultural diversity of the cities. It’s something businesses look at when they decide where to locate to tap into the global economy.
On paper, Calgary is the third most diverse city in Canada, behind Vancouver and Toronto, said Gibbins.
But in image, Calgary falls behind. Its popular perception is as a “monolithic white anglophone community hostile to the outside world.”
Edmonton markets itself as “Edmonton, Canada” rather than “Edmonton, Alta.,” to distance itself from the perceptual baggage carried by the province.
While technology frees Western Canada “from the chains of geography,” said Gibbins, growth in the technology-fired new economy tends to happen in clusters of cities where like-minded people live, such as California’s Silicon Valley, in the suburbs of Ottawa and Vancouver’s Yaletown neighborhood.
“The face of the new economy is emphatically urban,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine a sector that has been more exposed to the global economy than western Canadian agriculture, said Gibbins.
In some ways, prairie agriculture can be seen as the canary in the coal mine for the challenges other Canadian sectors will face when going global, Gibbins said.
But farmers will be hard-pressed to convince other Canadians – even those who live in nearby cities – that the grain economy is part of Canada’s future.
