We all live by myths. I cling to the myth that if I wasn’t married and a pastor, I’d be a magnet for supermodels. Since I’m committed to my wife and my calling, I suppose I’ll never get a chance to test that myth. Just as well.
Rural communities are wrapped in myths. I grew up believing the romantic myth of the pioneer family. But my grandfather didn’t. He homesteaded near Calgary in the early 1900s and knew the reality. That’s why he wouldn’t go to pioneer museums with us.
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“They just remind me of all the back-breaking work” he said. “There were 13 of us living in a converted chicken shack-what’s romantic about that?”
Some rural myths have been engineered. In the 1700s and 1800s, British entrepreneurs wanted to break the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier planned to “fill up the west” to keep the Americans from taking it over. So they promoted prairie fertility in Europe with wild hyperbole, trying to attract settlers.
Hugh Fraser told of cabbages measuring five feet in circumference, and six-foot cucumbers. Clifford Sifton distributed posters showing prairie trees growing fruit the size of watermelons. Those who followed that dream were crushed to discover how different the reality was.
There are modern rural myths too. It seems to me that rural Canada is not going to move ahead until it begins to dispel them. Here are a few of those myths:
1) Rural Canada is mostly about farming. Actually, less than 10 percent of rural Canadians farm, according to Statistics Canada. They live from manufacturing, logging, fisheries, tourist and government services, arts and crafts, for example. Rural Canada is a rich tapestry of workstyles.
2) Rural Canadians are slowly becoming extinct. While there is rural depopulation in Saskatchewan and the Maritimes, this is not true in the rest of Canada. Overall Canada’s rural population grew by one percent between 2001 and 2006. Alberta’s grew by more than three percent. Even in remote rural areas, far from urban centres, the population stayed almost the same.
3) Rural communities are safe from urban problems of crime and addictions. Actually, the rates are similar, in fact higher in some rural areas. But it is not always easy for rural people to admit to such problems.
4) Rural communities have few resources. Actually, they are wealthy. We tend to measure our resources by our disposable income. But there is a lot of stuff we don’t count, such as relationships. Those who owe us a favour, or love us, are resources that can be counted on for help. Access to institutions and to natural beauty, experiences and skills, things we’d be willing to lend, and so on, are resources too and there are many ways to combine those things. We can build healthy, viable communities if we just open our eyes to rural wealth and start thinking creatively.
Rural Canada has a wonderful future, if it can see itself as it is – facing deep challenges, but rich in people and resources to meet them.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.
