Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 8 - Evidence - Meeting of October 17, 2006
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 7:16 p.m. to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good evening, honourable senators, witnesses and all of you who are watching our Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. Last May, this committee was authorized to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada. For too long, the plight of rural Canadians struggling with low incomes has been partly ignored by policy-makers and politicians.
It is rather fortuitous that we are meeting today because this is the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Governments and nongovernmental organizations the world over have been celebrating and observing this day since 1993.
As the United Nations has often pointed out, when we talk about poverty on a global scale, very often we mean rural poverty. While the situation in wealthy countries like Canada is not nearly as bleak as it is in developing countries, we, too, have our rural poverty problem.
Until the end of this year, our committee will hear from a variety of different witnesses who will give an overview of poverty in Canada's rural areas. This work will then serve as a basis for the committee's planned travel. We will hit the road to rural communities all across this country next year.
Today we are very pleased to have with us representatives from the Rural Secretariat. The Rural Secretariat was created in 1998 to lead and coordinate the federal government's rural strategy. It also helps raise awareness about rural issues, both within government and within the broader community, to which we will go. While the Rural Secretariat does not focus on rural poverty per se, it can help us understand the particular challenges and the concerns faced by people living in rural areas, living on the land.
With us this evening are Ms. Donna Mitchell, Executive Director, Rural and Co-operatives Secretariats, and Ms. Christine Burton, Director, Rural Policy and Strategic Development. Ms. Mitchell is from Sherbrooke, Quebec, and Ms. Burton comes from Melville, Saskatchewan. We are very happy that you are here. We are not happy with the issue but we would not want to go on our travels without having heard from you.
[Translation]
Donna Mitchell, Executive Director, Rural and Co-operatives Secretariats, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: Madam Chair, thank you for inviting me this evening. The topic you have chosen to focus on at today's session and, from what I understand, most of the next year is of tremendous importance. I am pleased to appear before you to share some insights into issues facing rural Canada from the Rural Secretariat's perspective that may be of assistance in your review.
[English]
While the Rural Secretariat is based at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, it is more than about agriculture. It is also about fishing, forestry, and northern, Aboriginal and mining communities and the people who live in those communities.
Reflecting this multi-dimensional reality of rural life, the Rural Secretariat's mandate has been established in a threefold way: first, to provide leadership and coordination for the Canadian rural partnership; second, to facilitate liaison and creation of partnerships around rural issues and priorities; and, third, to promote dialogue between rural stakeholders and citizens and the federal government.
The key to our approach to carry out this mandate is that we cut across all federal government departments. We encourage all federal departments and agencies to design their programs and policies — be they economic, social, environmental or cultural — to take into account the unique needs of rural Canadians and to enhance their quality of life.
While you have already spoken to our minister about the farm income challenges in this country, the Rural Secretariat's role involves looking beyond agriculture into the wider rural community.
I should also tell you briefly about the Co-operatives Secretariat, which is also part of my branch, because it plays out in rural Canada in a unique way. Essentially, the mandate of the Co-operatives Secretariat is to ensure that the needs of the co-operative sector are taken into account by the federal government in its policies, programs and services. We are there to provide governments, key economic stakeholders and the general public with information that promotes an accurate understanding of co-operatives and the co-operative model.
As you know, this is not the first time this chamber has tackled the issue of rural poverty. The Senate's Croll committee, back in the late-1960s, shone a light on poverty and also looked at rural poverty. That has led to an appropriate and greater awareness of poverty in Canada.
To build on that, to date, from the Rural Secretariat's perspective, we have found that most research done on poverty in Canada focuses on urban poverty. Relatively few studies exist that specifically examine rural poverty.
It should be noted that it is often difficult to distinguish between what is a «cause» of poverty and what is an «effect» of poverty. This plays out no differently in rural Canada. It is almost a classic «chicken and egg» conundrum. Poverty is, without a doubt, a very complex issue.
Poverty in rural Canada involves low income; lack of employment; lack of access to transportation, often making it difficult to access employment opportunities or essential services; the high costs of new housing construction; the poor quality of existing housing stocks, often leading to higher costs of heating; poor health and lack of accessible health care; sometimes seasonal employment; low levels of education; and the lack of access to higher education. Indeed, it is very complex.
[Translation]
As Minister Strahl pointed out to this committee, rural communities that depend on single industries are vulnerable to the impacts of global market effects in that industry.
Historically, many changes in resource industries have been a result of new technology and increased productivity, leading to down-sizing of the labour force, and loss of income and job opportunities for rural residents. As productivity improves, communities need to be positioned to be able to assist their displaced citizens into new employment.
[English]
Poverty in rural areas can be a cause of out-migration, with individuals and families leaving in search of better employment opportunities and as a way to try to avoid or escape poverty. As rural areas already have relatively small populations, this can affect the availability of local services which, without a sufficient population base to fund or justify their presence, can then be forced to close.
As noted, education levels — access to education, including higher education — are clearly related to rural poverty as job skills become increasingly important to employment options. It is important to note that there is a two-way link between education and employment. A lack of education reduces an individual's ability to secure employment and, without a job, that individual and their family are less likely to obtain additional education to move up the income scale, thus perpetuating the poverty level.
Rural citizens feel that they face higher costs of post-secondary education when they have to send their children away in order to get access to post-secondary education.
Canada is not alone in this kind of conundrum and complexity of issues surrounding rural poverty. For example, in the United States, recent research points to the rural-urban income gap being caused by lower rural education attainment and less competition for workers among rural employers, leading to lower wages offered and fewer highly skilled, highly paid jobs in the rural occupational mix.
Europe is facing different challenges when it comes to rural poverty. For example, in England, migration to rural areas instead of out of rural areas, while bringing new residents and new wealth to the region, is also having a negative consequence on rural citizens as rural housing prices rise and push housing stock out of the reach of rural citizens. That is a demonstration of the complex nature of the interrelationship between progress and poverty.
[Translation]
I would now like to highlight some of the efforts that we have undertaken at the RCS to fulfill our mandate and support our colleagues throughout the federal government in their efforts to address issues of rural poverty.
[English]
In order to facilitate liaison amongst the federal departments, stakeholders and academics and the creation of partnerships to address rural issues and priorities, we in the secretariats created a rural development network made up of federal policy and research workers from close to 34 departments and agencies. The network provides a central point or community of expertise within the federal government for policy analysts developing new knowledge and fostering information-sharing about rural issues, allowing for greater cooperation amongst departments.
In addition to that, the National Rural Research Network is a complementary, non-governmental research organization created as a mechanism to raise the profile and awareness of rural research and to facilitate and support the implementation of research and tools for rural communities and practitioners. The goal of this network is to establish an ongoing, largely virtual network of individuals and institutions involved in research on rural issues and/or the application of research results in rural areas.
Recent work includes studies on the aspects of rural youth, in particular rural youth migration. Ongoing research with other departments includes work on the quality of life indicators for rural Canada, infrastructure and the status of infrastructure, and the contribution of rural Canada to the gross domestic product.
We also recognize that you have talked to Statistics Canada, and we are proud of the partnership that we have been able to establish between the Canadian Rural Partnership and Statistics Canada. We are particularly proud of the production of the Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletins, which cover issues such as rural population growth, employment patterns, computer use and Internet use by members of rural households. The bulletin is widely recognized in the research community as one of the critical research instruments for work on issues confronting rural Canadians. It is available to anyone on our website, at www.rural.gc.ca.
With the help of our partners we have also created the Community Information Database, or CID, as we call it for short. The CID was developed collaboratively by the secretariat, with provinces, territories, other federal departments and community groups. It is a free, web-based resource intended to help users quickly capture demographic and socio- economic data for specific or multiple geographic regions. We have been able to take that right down to a community size of anything over 250 citizens.
The site is intended to help users measure, assess and compare community performance. By using such a tool, community development practitioners, academics, policy-makers and citizens themselves will identify key socio- economic aspects and trends at the community level. They can compare information and analysis over time and amongst communities to provide information and analysis essential to good community development planning and decision making.
By providing a consistent, reliable and accessible source of statistical indicators at the community level in Canada, researchers and policy-makers, local decision makers and economic-development professionals will be able to perform the comparative analysis on several issues. Those issues include indicators of rural poverty, such as community income levels, educational attainment, population trends and skills available in the community. Then they can study what policies and programs are working or not working, and why they are working or not working. That is freely available to everyone at this point on our website at www.cid-bdc.ca.
As part of our mandate, we have also gone directly to over 17,000 Canadian citizens in rural Canada through our rural dialogues. Citizens in these dialogues have identified issues of concern and have ensured that the Rural Secretariat understands and is guided by their perspectives, their points of view and their priorities.
I do find it of particular interest in the many dialogues that I have observed that rural poverty, per se, was not identified by rural citizens as an issue, although many of the contributing factors that I have talked about certainly were identified by citizens. Your discussions may find that the title of rural poverty is not the way that citizens have come at the issues and priorities for rural Canada when we have talked to them.
[Translation]
I would also like to highlight our rural profiles. While you are travelling the country and hearing from witnesses before this committee, I think you will find these reports helpful as they examine population, economic, social and health-services indicators and they describe the differences that exist, not only between rural and urban, but between these different types of rural areas.
[English]
You will also be able to have access to all of these profiles; we are progressing. We have not done them all yet, but we have about seven or eight provinces already published and available on our website at www.rural.gc.ca. As you move around in your own deliberations, those may help you situate the different regions in rural Canada within any given province.
We also have a small programming component in both the Rural Secretariat and the Co-operative Secretariat and we call a major part of our program the models programs. It has a modest budget of $13.5 million, which leverages at least another $18.5 million, for a total of $37 million. This helps us to influence activities in about 200 rural communities at the local level over a period of five years.
The models program is basically a research-oriented program that tries to test successful rural development approaches in their own context. While the monetary investment is small for a national program, we are able to directly target specific issues that we want to study and see how they play out in different contexts in different communities across Canada, why they work and, just as much, why they might not work.
We have 21 models but many more communities attached to the models, and in some cases they are studying issues that are focused on the root causes of rural poverty, such as education, employment and health care.
In this regard I would like to give you a couple of examples of those models. The first one is called Les Petits Crayons. There are barriers that impede rural families from taking a key role in their children's childhood development. Among the reasons for this are isolation of families, sparse population and the lack of services. Les Petits Crayons model consists of an early childhood literacy club involving parents and preschool children. Parents are involved in curriculum development and in the management of the club itself. They participate alongside their children as they learn by doing crafts, playing games, reading and socializing, thus benefiting both themselves and their children. With research pointing to low education levels as one of the causes of poverty, this model shows how rural communities can adapt to deal positively with such challenges.
[Translation]
The second model I would like to highlight is Maisons Familiales Rurales. Founded in 1937 and rooted in southwestern France, the Maisons Familiales Rurales d'Éducation et d'Orientation model was developed by rural families to provide their children with general, social and vocational training. A proven success, this model has been adopted in Canada.
The MFR model is first and foremost an alternative school that is developed by and involving the participation of a rural community. It offers an alternating work and study program for students in secondary school. The program relies on the willingness of the community, educators and business sectors to partner to offer youth a professional training program, while ensuring the completion of their secondary education.
Lack of employment and low education levels contribute to rural poverty, and this model provides an opportunity for businesses, families and the education sector to meet local labour needs by keeping young people in their communities with skilled employment.
[English]
The final model that I will bring to your attention is called the Integrated Hub Model. Those who live in rural Canada know how difficult it can be to find and access services, whether it is for children, families, youth, adults or seniors. Many have found that if social services are available, often they are not located within the community or open during hours when they are most needed.
The Integrated Hub Model investigates how communities can benefit from adapting their service delivery by integrating the delivery of services in one location and delivering them through an interdisciplinary staff team or through other community-driven innovations and initiatives.
This model is already working well in Manitoba and we are hoping to replicate it with the Child Care Family Access Network, CFAN, in other rural communities. Port au Port, Newfoundland and Labrador, is the first community in which we are testing this model.
I will go back for a moment to the cooperative side of my responsibility. Canadian cooperatives have certainly proven to be effective in addressing some of the issues associated with rural poverty. Cooperatives are a proven tool for mutual self-help, allowing people to work together toward common goals, which, in turn, help to build social cohesion by promoting inclusion, trust, and equity amongst citizens. In their 100-year history in Canada, cooperatives have helped thousands of disadvantaged people and communities to create effective solutions to social and economic challenges, while building local leadership skills, local autonomy and control. Canadians continue to use the co-op model in innovative ways to address a wide range of needs and challenges, including the needs of Aboriginal and immigrant communities, youth, disabled persons, and low-income sectors of communities.
In 2003, the Government of Canada launched a five-year, $15 million program, the Co-operative Development Initiative, CDI, to build and increase cooperative development capacity in Canada and to research and test innovative applications of the co-op model to address economic and social challenges faced by Canadians in both rural and urban settings.
Co-op projects implemented across Canada in the last two and a half years under the CDI funding are providing health and homecare services; promoting youth employment, tourism, environmentally-friendly farming; and fighting poverty. These co-ops work toward the common goal of the improvement of economic and sole well-being of not only individuals but also entire communities. They are particularly helpful in smaller rural communities.
In closing, many of the outcomes of rural poverty — poor housing, lack of education, lack of transportation and poor health — are unfortunately also causes of poverty. These intertwined attributes of poverty point to a cycle in poverty's pervasive negative impacts, influencing generation after generation of vulnerable population groups, including rural Canadians. Clearly, one level of government alone cannot solve the issue of rural poverty. No single measure will be the magic bullet to end rural poverty. However, I do believe that the Rural Secretariat's work in encouraging and supporting a multitude of departments across the federal government to take into account the unique needs and concerns of the rural population and communities when we formulate our programs, our policies and our services is an essential piece of this puzzle.
We look forward to your report and the recommendations that you will be making on this issue. If there is any way that we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to ask.
The Chairman: It is a pleasure to have you here. Ms. Burton, do you wish to add comments?
Christine Burton, Director, Rural Policy and Strategic Development, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: I encourage you to move to questions.
Senator Tkachuk: With the growth in Canada over the last two decades, the Free Trade Agreement and the bringing of the deficit under control by the Liberal government, jobs seem to be plentiful. Just today in the Senate Senator Mitchell was talking about Grande Prairie and the employment difficulties there as in many other Western communities. It is also a serious issue in British Columbia and is becoming a problem in Saskatchewan. The problem is we cannot recruit people to fill the job vacancies. We do not have enough people to handle the available jobs. These are not necessarily unskilled positions but rather skilled jobs in the mining sector. One senator from BC said that those positions pay $95,000 per year and yet, getting miners to take the jobs is a difficult problem.
The last time that we looked at the numbers there was not much difference in the rural and urban poverty percentages. Do you have programs that help people to be mobile or do we say simply that they have a right to be poor and even though there are jobs, they do not have to take them? How do we handle those public policy issues when it seems that the economy is booming? Both the federal government and the opposition believe in lower taxes, which to me is like manna from heaven. I know the economy will continue to grow because of that.
In the last 20 minutes, no one has said anything about all the jobs that are available. Are people taking them? Are they not prepared to take them? What is the story? Why are people poor?
Ms. Mitchell: That is an extremely good question and an excellent place to start. Yes, jobs are plentiful, and not all rural communities are diminishing. In Europe, there have been a number of studies done on what they call leading and lagging communities. When there are two communities that seem to have about the same opportunities and have in the past been deeply affected by global changes and things that Canadians cannot control, why will one be able to find a way forward and adjust while the other will not?
One thing that we have found particularly helpful, which you will find in our regional profiles, is that not all rural zones are the same. If you live close to a metropolitan area, you may be one of the wealthiest rural Canadians. The zones with the strongest metropolitan influence are those where people travel into the town for 30 per cent of their income, on average. They use all the facilities of the city. Their children are educated at the institutions of the city and all the social institutions are available. It is a rich place, yet you can probably find a bigger, better and newer home for less money. That is the richest part of Canada and people there are in fact better off than many urbanites.
Moving outward from that zone there are areas that are still within market distance. The people probably still earn their living in the metropolitan area. They have good transportation systems and good social and economic infrastructures. People can diversify and get beyond some of the things that are totally out of their control.
The next level has a weak metropolitan influence. There you find fewer and fewer opportunities. When you go to the very remote rural areas there are very poor opportunities. There are places where they depend on ice roads in the winter and otherwise have only fly-in capability. In that zone, the schools, the services and the social infrastructure are challenged.
There are very different types of rural areas. In its study of Canada, the OECD said that rural Canadians are very rich in underutilized assets. There are women and Aboriginals who are not employed. Those who are employed are not in higher-level jobs. The infrastructure is usable and could be expanded, and there are new opportunities; however, you must be able to match the skills of the people with the job opportunities.
You are talking about areas that have found a way to continue to grow. There is still a part of rural Canada that has not been able to take advantage of growth, per se. Communities like Lethbridge and Grande Prairie do not have these troubles. In fact, some of them go the other extreme, such as Fort McMurray, and cannot find enough people to fill the jobs because they are growing faster than their ability to accommodate.
What do we do about the no-growth or slow-growth areas to help them to adapt, to ensure that the people have the skills that will enable them to stay there if they wish, to help alleviate poverty through good jobs, good services, et cetera?
The situation is very uneven across the country with regard to how prepared the citizens are and how prepared the rural leadership is to adjust away from what they knew as a successful, viable small community.
Senator Tkachuk: Are we operating under a policy framework where the people from a no-growth area have the right to stay there and the government has an obligation to foster economic development, or is the policy that they have to move to where there is a job? Under what policy framework are we working and spending money?
Ms. Mitchell: I am not aware that governments have tried to promulgate a right to stay as an entitlement. I can describe the attachment that people have to the land, or to where their parents and ancestors grew up. Aboriginal people are particularly attached to the land that they have always known, and they want to stay.
How do we come to grips with that situation? As I said, I am not aware that there is an attempt to build an entitlement to stay and be supported in certain ways, but there may be other alternatives where we see that opportunities are available. In the dialogues we held, we noticed in about the third year how anxious, given the opportunity, rural citizens were to take their future into their own hands and do something themselves. They want to determine what the population of that area feels is the vision for their community and then determine and develop strategies in order to make that happen. It does not necessarily mean that they will grow; it means that they need to find a way to remain sustainable for that community.
Research from the United States shows us that there are certain things that must be present in order to remain sustainable. A very specific kind of leadership is important, leadership that will bring together, involve and engage the citizens in a common purpose. The community must have the ability to use all the resources that governments make available. We have hundreds of programs, but some communities cannot take advantage of the programs for which they would be eligible because they do not have the wherewithal to write the proposals, monitor the spending of monies in the way that we require, et cetera, or even to find the sources of the programs.
How do communities acquire the skills to lead, to gather people together and to design a plan and strategy that could be sustainable? We see that in many of the leading communities as opposed to the lagging communities, they have a specific kind of leadership; they find a raison d'etre, and then they gradually find strategies. It is not usually a big bang; it is usually one job, one institution, one new set of services or rescuing the services that are there in a new and innovative way. Those kinds of things are still available in a policy sense to be explored by communities that are not currently growth oriented.
Senator Mitchell: Senator Tkachuk asks a central question and there is probably a good deal of truth to the implication of his question. Alternatively, would it be reasonable to assume that, first, some people who cannot get a job where they live, cannot get a job for the same reasons where they have moved. For example, they may not have the skills set or education to get a job.
Second, all kinds of people leave where they live for a new job. Witness Fort McMurray, which is the standard joke, but it is Newfoundland and Labrador several provinces removed. That is wonderful and to say that people do not move to jobs is to deny the initiative, strength and commitment that those people have undergone. That happens all over the country.
The reverse would be that if everyone up and left a community that did not have a job, then all that infrastructure that has been invested, community networks and inherent infrastructure that is there and has tremendous value, is gone. It is not just an easy black and white solution. It is not. Most people do want to work. Practically everyone I have met wants to work.
This begs the question. You have an interesting model of leadership and community leadership that can solve some of that problem. How do you find the people and train the leadership? Is it the mayor, the reeve, the school principal? Who does it? Is it the chamber of commerce? Is it just one person?
Ms. Mitchell: You have made a very important point. Will people move for jobs? Yes. Are those people, who move to escape poverty in one area and do not seem to be equipped to get the jobs there, any better offer in urban areas? There is some evidence that says no. They are still ill-equipped to get jobs but there may be more jobs from which to choose.
Senator Mitchell: There may be no place for them to live when they get there.
Ms. Mitchell: There would seem to be a requirement for different kinds of interventions that go beyond my ability to predict for you.
What I do see and we hear so often in rural Canada is that they are losing their people. They are losing the heart of the community. They are losing their young people so they can go away to for an education. They do not mind them going away to get educated but they cannot get them to come back. What we find, and the statistics tell, is that the young people and the older people are moving away. The ones moving into rural Canada are more, somewhat, our generation, the beginning of the baby boomer generation. However, they are not moving nearly in the kinds of numbers that you see in Europe, for example, or in the U.K.
Part of it is perspective. Rural Canadians see that as they get older and lose their youth and their child-bearing families over a couple of generations, they are then losing their services. There is not a lot left for them and they mourn that loss. They would like to see a change and they are willing to participate in trying to make that change.
I wish there was a perfect model that you could go and pluck the leader, but sometimes, for example, it is the schoolteacher. There was a wonderful example in a study done in the U.S. of an illiterate Black woman, probably into her sixties, who raised up a community out of dire poverty just by force of her personality and determination. I was told, as an anecdote, that she practically sat on the USDA doorstep to convince people. She was a different kind of leader and determined to do it.
Senator Mitchell: Can you teach and learn leadership? Where do you do that? Where are we training leaders in a specific organized fashion in our society? We do that training in the military, but where else.
Ms. Mitchell: I can give you one example. It was through a small program that has sunsetted now. We provided some funding for a group called Action Humboldt in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. They did a self-diagnosis. They took their information and understanding of what their community was and said, «We have to do something about this.» They invited a not-for-profit group called the Estey Centre to help guide them. Six and seven surrounding small farm communities got together with them and the Estey Centre helped them build their skills in facilitating the sessions they needed to have with their citizens to determine their vision, strengths and assets. They determined what they could build on and had to make some tough decisions. Rural communities are like any of us. You say, «What is your ideal?» Well, it is the moon. But now, what can we do? That may be different. Getting people to understand that and to walk themselves through it was a very successful enterprise from the point of view of Action Humboldt, Humboldt citizens and the six surrounding communities. They are on their way to stemming the outflow of young people, of engaging their business community in making the community a better place and engaging their business community in encouraging entrepreneurship. They found themselves in the iron and metal triangle and built on that because they already have something like that in their communities.
It is hard to say. There are leadership courses, but they are not necessarily the way to go. Pulling the expert in who then does a report and goes away does not necessarily engage the citizens in a way that leaves them something when the expert leaves. I am not sure every community would have the same kind of expertise or need. It varies tremendously.
Senator Tkachuk: I have been to Humboldt and I know people from there.
I want to get back to my train of thought. I am not trying to be crass. Senator Mitchell tried to point out that even though I asked a good question I was going in the wrong direction, I was not. I am trying to find out if there are common denominators of poverty. I want to point out, so that other senators and the Canadian public can see, if there are common denominators and whether the programs we have are actually working. I covered two points but I have one more question that I want to ask. I think it is apropos.
When I was in Berlin and they were building and rebuilding Potsdam. They were moving from Bonn to the capital in Berlin. There were a million things going on and cranes everywhere and I said to the government official taking us around, «You have 16 per cent unemployment rate. How can that be possible when all of Berlin is under construction?» He said that their social programs were so good that no one wanted to work. I asked who was doing the work and he said the Turks. I asked do you not hate the Turks. He said, yes, but someone has to work.
Are our social programs so generous that they are an impediment to economic development and are they an impediment to mobility? In other words, it is more comfortable to be where I am. I have this, that and the other, rather than move somewhere to take a job. It may not be the highest paying job, but it is a job. To me, the way to keep people from not being poor is to provide opportunities so they have work. I do not mean make-work projects; I mean real economic work as they do in Humboldt, where there are a number of manufacturing plants in the agriculture industry. Humboldt is a thriving community.
The good thing about Humboldt is that it always had that work ethic. It is a German Catholic community that has always been quite prosperous. I am sure the community took action before things got so bad that the citizens could not do anything. They have turned it into a special thing. Humboldt is a real success story in our province.
Ms. Mitchell: In our dialogues, I do not think we ever found that rural citizens said there was a lack of a work ethic and that people did not want to find jobs.
We do not know as much about rural poverty as we do urban poverty. What I see are those communities that tend to fall out of the economic capacity. Those communities do not have readily available jobs. They have not engaged their seniors, Aboriginal communities, immigrants, single parents, et cetera in the economic side through jobs.
We do not have a very fulsome set of research. In fact, I am not aware of very much research in rural Canada. We tend to know, for example, how many single mothers exist in a province and how many are in urban and rural settings, but that is it. We do not know anything more about the rural dynamic of that information. Thirteen or 14 per cent of Canadians are living in rural poverty. Whether they are able, or whether more things need to be done to engage them in work that would allow them to earn a living and get themselves out of the poverty line, I do not know. I do not know whether that is available and whether the social programs have been successful to do that or not. I do not know because I am not aware of people having been able to study that subject.
In terms the more able-bodied people — and would jobs be the answer or should they move to other jobs — I do not have the formula for that. I just know it is not happening in a way that substantially diminishes the poverty level in rural Canada, other than through moving out of it.
Senator Callbeck: I am from a rural area and I am interested in these dialogues. You mentioned that you contacted roughly 17,000 rural residents. Was this in one year? I notice in the briefing notes that there were 13 meetings. Is that the first year they were held or do they go on every year?
Ms. Mitchell: We have had dialogues ever since the Rural Secretariat was set up under the Canadian Rural Partnership. We are going on to almost 10 years. Although I was not here, I believe the dialogue started fairly early.
We are talking about going to a small community of fewer than 10,000 people and having a dialogue with a group of 20-30 people, usually a mix of local leadership, elected leadership, stakeholders, service deliverers and people who just have a point of view in their community. They will sit down and identify their perspectives, priorities, and what they feel the governments should know. That has been our touchstone. We bring that information back to the federal government and try to have other federal departments understand the perspective of rural citizens on the government's policies, programs and services.
Senator Callbeck: Would the recommendations from these meetings be similar in most of the meetings right across the country?
Ms. Mitchell: Most of the dialogue is on identifying the issue, looking at priorities and usually discussing what role the community would have and what role the government should have. How does the community see government playing a role in their moving forward? For example, a community might comment that a program's rules and the requirements are so difficult that it has given up trying to use it. That is the kind of feedback we have heard from some of the communities. We do not ask the communities to design a rural policy while we attend these sessions.
Senator Callbeck: Is that the only contact that you have with the community?
Ms. Mitchell: We have the meeting, interviews and feedback. All of the feedback for each of those sessions is then translated back to the people who participated. It is also put out on our website for them to be able to go back and see what has been said by others.
Senator Callbeck: You mentioned that when the government is formulating policy you play a role and try to get it to see the issue through the rural lens. When do you get involved with the policy? Do they come to you with the policy? What is the process?
Ms. Mitchell: It is very different across different areas.
I will give you a couple of examples. Statistics Canada early on said it would like to partner with communities because it has all the census data. That data can help the rural population understand just what is going on in rural Canada. There was a partnership there early on. Their policy is to support the development of rural Canada through the development of information, which is their métier. At Infrastructure Canada, we are on our third major level of infrastructure at the federal level. In the first level, there was no set-aside, no specific objective of dealing with rural Canada. A lot of the money was put into large projects that tended to be around larger cities. By the second infrastructure program, we had worked with that group and set aside between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of the monies that were going into infrastructure for smaller communities. We now, at the third stage, have a rural municipal infrastructure fund, which has its own particularities and its own type of approach. For example, the community of Nunavut was desperate for housing to bring leadership in and house its own people. Even though water and transportation was the major thrust of the Nunavut infrastructure program, there was the ability to use that fund for housing. We have been able to work with the infrastructure people who design those programs and write cabinet submissions so that the politicians can make decisions based on rural interests. They can obtain a general understanding of how things play out in rural Canada and understand both the obstacles and the capacities. These have been have been put to good use. There are other times that, when any department makes a cabinet proposal, the government system requires them to share that information interdepartmentally so that no one is left out of the loop until something is done that might otherwise not have been done. Therefore, full advice would not go into the policy decisions of cabinet. Sometimes that is the first notice that we have. More and more, and with the creation of our network of policy and research practitioners, we seem to be in a position to feed them information, knowledge and practices that will allow them, in their own right when asked to contribute in their department to the aspects and options of the policy, to do so with full knowledge of what is happening in rural Canada. We are making progress and maturing as we go along. We have better tools but are we all the there yet? No.
Senator Callbeck: Have you been involved with Health Canada? There was a report last month that said rural Canadians are not as healthy as people from urban areas.
Ms. Mitchell: Yes. Health Canada was one of the first large federal departments to establish a rural health secretariat group, specifically to look at the aspects of rural health. That has changed and it has been moved into something different but there is still the base of knowledge and understanding of health. Health Canada was one of the funders behind that particular study.
With the help of Health Canada, we have known for a while that those are the kinds of results and differences you see in mortality rates, suicide rates, health factors, such as diabetes and smoking-related diseases, which is more prevalent in rural Canada. They have brought those things into our thinking so that we can take those to our network while Health Canada works with its provincial counterparts to shape the kinds of services and approaches available for prevention. The government has been a very good partner dedicated to the idea of understanding the differences for rural Canada.
Senator Peterson: I thank the presenters for coming here tonight. I come from Saskatchewan where we have many small villages and towns of 100 to 400 people. I would define them as «rural communities» in Saskatchewan. Their viability and success were predicated on the grain elevators, the train station, the schools, the post office and the surrounding farm population. They tore down the farm elevators, moved the stations away, consolidated the schools and the rural farm population is diminishing. Trying to fix that will be extremely difficult. You asked, «What makes one community prosper and another one not prosper?» The ones that prosper and have a chance of hanging on are the ones that have the hospital, the consolidated school and a recreational component. I have a summer home on Lake Diefenbaker in the small village of Elbow with a population of 300. It survives because the population triples in summer because of a golf course, et cetera. Those people have done everything on their own. They have set up a tourism committee manned by volunteers with little or no government money or help. Eventually, however, they become exhausted because they run out of bodies. If you are looking at things to do and places to focus on to try to keep those that are left going, I would suggest that you might look there.
I understand that education does not keep them in the small communities. Rather education is their ticket to leave and find jobs elsewhere, so that is not the solution because it creates a bigger problem. We must be selective in our programming. I noticed that you started your Rural Secretariat in 1998. You have one and a half years to go. Will you finish your work? Will you need more funding?
Ms. Mitchell: Certainly, that will not be my decision. We have had our second five-year increment and we have made advances. We have instilled a number of different elements but we were not created as a large programming department. Our success is not based on large programs but based on creating the information and bringing awareness. I have a dedicated and proud group of people who work extremely hard at their jobs. I think that we will make as strong a case as possible that there is still more to be done. The art of the possible would say that there is more maturity to a group like the secretariat in aid of rural Canada. Whether we will be convincing has yet to be seen; whether there is a different way is the decision of the government-of-the-day.
For very small communities of 100 to 400 people it is more difficult to find ways to diversify. The volunteers are getting older and they are getting tired because they are the same people year after year, given that no natural replacements are moving to town. The OECD has looked at how successful those small communities can be if they look beyond their own community. They call it «territoriality.» I have an example of that from British Columbia. The Sunshine Coast has some lovely villages along the water. I remember going there for info fairs where the federal government demonstrated its array of services for businesses, et cetera. At that time there were three tourism booths, all located in communities within 20 miles of each other. Their impression was that they were in competition. Yet, they had structured themselves in such a way that when I went up there on holidays, I did not stay overnight but instead I drove up, drove through and went on further. There was not enough to do. Yet, they had water, nature trails and all kinds of opportunities. Until communities find that 300 or 400 people might not be large enough to have a critical mass for sustainability over the long term, they have to look around and see their options. It is a bit like Humboldt where its strength is in working together as opposed to working as though every business is the competition to the business next to it. It is a difficult sell in Canada. We are not that collective in our thinking. Perhaps the French Canadian way of thinking is more attune to that because we find more successes of that kind in Quebec, where they look at the regions, determine the available wealth and then spread that wealth amongst the regions. They also find ways to work together better.
For small communities, that is the only thing that I have seen suggested in the research that might be successful. Ms. Burton certainly brings to mind, Morden-Winkler, where they share a hospital, for example. It is not ideal to share a hospital. Some people will have to travel a bit further. You would rather have it in your own community, but if it is not sustainable and you cannot get doctors and nurses to stay in your community, the alternative may have to be sharing or some innovative use of technology to augment that which was not previously available.
Senator Peterson: The smaller communities have come together. Where is the economic development officer in Outlook? Probably where they least need it, but they have the tax base there to support one. It is probably the same in Humboldt. They probably have a fully-paid economic development officer who can do these things. The other communities that you are trying to hold together need that help. We need to find some way to help the volunteers help themselves, if they are prepared to do it, and they are. There has to be something, otherwise they are going to be gone too because they eventually tire out and there will be no one left.
The Chairman: My own area of Lethbridge, Alberta, is surrounded by very small towns in an agricultural area. The current mayor and city council has turned this almost into a regional community where they meet together, particularly on things that are involved with economic matters, and they are bringing in those smaller communities and it has made a difference, there is no doubt about it.
Senator Gustafson: I have come to the conclusion that we are taking on a big job. Poverty levels; where does it start? It is all individual. I may have a different idea of poverty than Senator Tkachuk. What age group suffers the most?
Ms. Mitchell: The poverty level really is not in what you count. Do you only count income? Do you count assets? When do you count them and when do you not count them? The measures that Mr. Bollman talked to you about, low- income cut-off and some of the others, the numbers change depending on what you have in the basket. If you are looking just at food, clothing and shelter, you get one answer. If you are looking at transportation in rural areas, that puts the cost of living up substantially because you do not have public transportation options; cabs, those kinds of things that you have in urban Canada. However you have cheaper housing because of the cost in many of our metropolitan areas. What do you count?
What age? It would seem as though poverty spans every age group. There are still children living in poverty. There is evidence that there are young single mothers, there are disabled people of all ages living in poverty. There are still older people who never had the attachment to the job market to let them retire with more, which then puts them into the poverty level.
I would say that any of the groups which have been disenfranchised from economic activity are subject to being at or below the poverty level; however you might define it in terms of a level itself.
Senator Gustafson: Some of the work that the research department has done in Parliament here has given the indication that the agricultural net farm income forecast for 2005 as 26 per cent lower than 2004. The forecast dropped 74 per cent in 2006.
There were four suicides in the area where I live, and each one was related to a depressed situation where the person had been well off 10 years ago. Each person had property that had been worth thousands of dollars 10 years ago. Today, the value of that land was dropped, and this is having a tremendous impact on farm families.
I may talk to someone from Alberta and they will say they do not have that problem. If you happen to own land on the corridor between Calgary and Edmonton, it is worth $250,000 a quarter section or more. We know what the sales brought in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, for instance, where land used to sell for $70,000 to $100,000 a quarter. The average is now $27,000 on 83 quarter section land.
This has had a major impact on farms, and I am sure that Ms. Burton from Melville can tell me the same thing. I was in the Minister of Agriculture's office in Regina and I went in to ask some questions about whether this was across the province or whether it was just in the southern part. He said it is right across the province.
You do not find that in Alberta. In fact, in Alberta you have a different problem. Land is over-inflated in Alberta, and I have been waiting for the day when people will come to Saskatchewan and buy our land for a quarter of the price. The over-inflation there may be of great benefit to Saskatchewan. It has not happened yet; hopefully it may. There are different areas of poverty and different reasons for it.
We mentioned the small towns. It seems to me there are small towns that really become small slums. There are older houses that people who do not have good jobs move into. On the other hand there are towns, for instance, like the little town that I live in, that is not far from Weyburn or Estevan where there is an oilfield. They find that to be a place of cheap housing and it becomes a benefit to them, and they have the wherewithal to do a little remodelling and so on.
Ms. Mitchell: In our dialogues, one of the things that we heard from each group was that, their situation was unique. When you look at it, it is. It is a bit of a conundrum for us because it is difficult to find a way to build on that. It is one of the reasons that we decided that people really needed to have the facts, that they needed to be able to understand their dynamic, their strengths and whether they were the same or different from others.
Rural citizens, leaders and researchers told us that the only option was to figure out for themselves what to do with their future. They had to do their own survey, which was likely beyond their capacity, or buy something from Statistics Canada that they could not afford, did not know what to do with, and really did not help. All they had was anecdotal evidence as to who they were and what they were.
This was the reason for our putting together and working with provinces and territories and stakeholders, to take Statistics Canada's last two census years onto this database. That information allows a small town, as long as it is over 250 people, and lets you go in and look at 20 different indicators and how it has changed or not over the past two census and soon to be three census years. It will show you how many people have moved out across a variety of age groups. It will show you the information base and manufacturing base. Do you have an entrepreneurial presence or are you dependent on a single industry that is likely to put you at risk and make you more vulnerable? If so, is that in your strategic plan to move out of this, is that not something that is important?
Probably one of the hardest things we see is for people in small, well-to-do towns who depended on fishery, forestry and agriculture trying to adjust. The productivity that those sectors have sought in order to be successful for Canada, domestically and internationally, have fewer jobs as well as fewer well-paying jobs. It has not been necessarily easy to find a way to replace that industry. Our encouragement for those small towns looking for a way to move ahead is to understand the situation and see, based on the facts, whether or not it can discover ways that are more likely to successfully move forward.
Senator Gustafson: A lot of these small-town people commute 20 or 30 miles for a job everyday. However, the person doing that is not allowed to depreciate his gasoline or his old truck or whatever he is driving to work. Even a farmer can do that, but he cannot do that. There are things that could be done to help these people who commute and work at jobs off the smaller villages. I do not know whether you got that through or not. For instance, mechanics could not depreciate their tools for a long time. Has that changed? The point I wish to make is that there are things government could do to help in those kinds of situations.
Ms. Mitchell: Your statement brought to mind one of the changes made with one of the last budgets around trying to encourage apprenticeship throughout industries that are in smaller towns. I think there are mechanisms that certainly can be explored. Often people in our dialogues would mention those kinds of barriers or things that could make it more feasible for them, and that needs to be brought in to government for consideration as to whether or not it would be a good public policy. I do not have a particular thought on that either way.
Senator Tkachuk: Senator Peterson was talking about small towns. I am from the same province, so I see the same thing. However, I am an optimist about these things. Nothing is ever the same. Everything changes. The key is to adapt to change and to find ways to make it easier for people to adapt to change. The hardest thing for people to do is to change, especially in mid-life, when you have a couple of teenaged kids.
Someone mentioned something about education. I see little nuggets of positive things. You mentioned education was a way out. In a way, it is a way back in. The people who are moving back to rural communities are the very highly educated. They are the people working in high tech and publishing.
I travel with an international engineer who does consulting work all over the world, and he lives in Carrot River or someplace. He gets in the car at the Saskatoon airport and drives home because he likes living out there. He does not have to live out there. He could probably live in Paris or Toronto or almost anywhere. His wife is from Saskatchewan, and she likes it out there.
I see those things, and so I have a lot of optimism about rural Canada. Rural Canada is a beautiful place, and people will want to be there as long as it is an attractive place to live.
There are a lot of things that government can do from a positive point of view through the tax system, education system and through mobility to make all these things more comfortable for people to adapt to change.
I am not downplaying the local leader fighting with some government department to make things great in the community. That will happen naturally because leaders happen along when you least expect it, and all of a sudden things change. From our perspective, we cannot legislate any of that stuff. That either happens or does not happen.
Does your agency try to focus on some of the positive things such as where communities are doing well or how other communities can follow the same game plans? Those are the things that I think are important, at least to us. I should say important to me. I am hoping it is important to all of us.
Ms. Mitchell: I am like you in that I am very hopeful. We see the entrepreneurial spirit in rural Canadians. Sixty per cent of small businesses in Canada are in rural Canada because people have found ways of using their education or using the situation to be quite entrepreneurial. That is very positive.
In addition, governments have looked at what is new that would be the basis of change and adaptation; for example, broadband and access to technology. It takes a while, but we have done some looking in our small-town bulletins with regard to whether rural Canadians use technology. I would say they are catching up. With regard to farmers, people might think they do not use technology, but they do more and more frequently. The more tools we give them, the more likely they are to use them because it benefits them.
With my own group, we have looked at what tools within our own right we can provide to rural communities. We have investigated a number of tools that communities can use as techniques of building social cohesion and a vision in their own communities, starting the process off of finding a way forward, adapting and acknowledging there is a change needed for them to go forward and identify some of those things.
Our models program is meant to try to indicate things that will successfully. Such items many be working at the community level to make change, whether it is an issue of mothers, fathers, and young children, building that capacity to be part of their children's education. It might be using the tools to figure out what the community needs to do to attract new immigrants or new businesses.
It is not just in the way they want it. Communities must do certain things. They must look at the environment that will help entrepreneurship. That is what the collective of a community can do as opposed to an agency that lends money to small businesses for the sake of small business expansion.
The financial capacity in rural Canada through resources like cooperatives or CFDCs, which lend money in a rural setting and make it available, are all important vehicles that have been created through governments. Are there more forms of aid? I would suggest yes, but we need to discover what those are and the best use of the investment.
Senator Callbeck: You talked about model programs that you had set up in 200 communities. You talked about the education and businesses helping to keep young people in the community. Could you explain that more fully?
Ms. Mitchell: That was Maisons Familiales Rurales, and it was something that we observed out of a Quebec dairy farm area in Granite. Their farmers were getting older and few young people wanted to move into farming. The young people they had came out of high school and went away and did not come back. There were young people who stayed behind, but very often — and this is in the terminology that young people from rural Canada give themselves, if they are stayers or leavers — the stayers are losers.
It takes the community to recognize that it has an asset. The community has to learn how to use that asset. They defined what they needed, which was next generation dairy farmers, and they said that many of the kids who stayed were high school dropouts. The community tried to think of ways to train these young people to become good dairy farmers. They wanted to train them in the most modern, environmentally friendly, good business management sense. The community wanted to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit and encourage the youth. If the area has a maple syrup capacity, they might be able to make that into a small side business or a niche product, because it takes know-how to do those kinds of things.
The community brought together a residential school/professional training program that had been tested in France. The community had to participate to define the needs. The provincial government had to participate because it was an educational program. The young people had to participate, and then there needs to be someone who carries it out and brings it along.
We saw that as a model that had been successful in one place, but these do not seem to get documented. If you ever ask why it worked, you do not know; people said it worked.
Our program asked the people familiar with the model to apply it in two or three other locations in Canada. They agreed to do so. We provided them with the funds to do that, but to run it as a local participation research program. They would do the project and put kids through their education and whatever the professional training would be, be it farming or something else, but they would document what the community got out of it, what the proponents got out of it and what the federal government, in funding it, would get out of it, along with any other partners.
Interestingly enough, what we are finding is that each of those participants will define the success in a different way, and each of the participants are very valid in the way their definitions. The community may say that it kept its young people. It may say that it kept second-generation farmers. Some communities remarked that they had new businesses popping up. The young girls who stayed behind found husbands. There were all kinds of socio-economic benefits, but defined in their terms.
I look at that and I define it as well-spent money on a government program that brought some benefit to the community and brought some research. That is not the way they defined it; and it is not even the way the proponent would define it, who says, we became a leader in the community where we were not really a leader before. We showed that we had skills that people did not recognize in the community before, et cetera.
Everyone defines their success in that kind of thing differently. This is why it is a participatory gathering of research information to document, quantify and legitimize that kind of activity in helping small communities.
Senator Callbeck: Is this the Canadian Rural Partnership?
Ms. Mitchell: That is right. The funding mechanism for us and the setting of our mandate was called the Canadian Rural Partnership. That is what defines our mandate and our funding within the secretariat itself.
Senator Callbeck: Does that particular program you are talking about come under that?
Ms. Mitchell: We have sponsored the implementation in two or three other locations in Canada with that group, which originated it in Granite.
Senator Callbeck: This Canadian Rural Partnership, I see the last announcement was in November. In other words, we have not done anything this year. Is there a reason for that? Are we not continuing on with this?
Ms. Mitchell: These are multi-year models. On average, the models are about three years in length, to do the kind of in situ experiment to get the real results. They are funded over a period of three years. I think it is 21 models that we have and I do not have any room for any more, nor do I have the time frame to the sunsetting of our funding.
Senator Gustafson: When we grew up in bigger families, we did not know we were poor. We thought we were well off. Have you any numbers on the cause of family breakdown and poverty?
Ms. Mitchell: No, I do not.
Senator Gustafson: It must be a factor.
Ms. Mitchell: We have not done that kind of study. We have not been made aware of research of that nature for rural Canada.
Senator Gustafson: Statistics tell us that 50 per cent of our marriages break up. Therefore, you will have family breakdown and that will have some results. Two can live cheaper than one.
Senator Mitchell: It will increase women in poverty as well.
Ms. Mitchell: In rural Canada, you have fewer single men and fewer single families than you do in urban Canada, by some margin, but I could not tell you what series of effects there are on families.
Senator Mitchell: How can we get reports on the projects that work? Is there some way we could get that so we would know?
Ms. Mitchell: What I can get you very are the tools that we are going to be putting out on our website, which are mechanisms for small communities to engage their citizens and provide leadership in thinking about who they are. In terms of our models, we are now drawing lessons learned from the earliest ones, but I realistically will not have model- by-model learnings and data before the end of this fiscal year.
Senator Mitchell: We could get them in January or February.
Ms. Mitchell: No, the end of fiscal year and then I will have to gather it together, but after that period of time. Maybe three months after that we should have something that would reflect what we are seeing in the models themselves.
Senator Mitchell: I would really like to see that. It would be something that would be perfect for this report. We could help you get the message out on those things.
The Chairman: I would like to end with a question that you touched on very briefly earlier on. You talked about the presence of government institutions, however large or small, as being of importance.
I remember — and many of these people around the table, if they did not know him, they would have heard about him — Jack Pickersgill, who was quite an extraordinary public figure in Ottawa. Mr. Pickersgill was a politician who I think began life in Manitoba — or was in Manitoba — and then he ended up in Newfoundland, where he had the major part of a very long and successful career.
His first thing that he would say to any new parliamentarian who came on to the Hill was, «The most important thing you can do as a member of Parliament is to make sure that you hang on to the post office, wherever you live, because that will be one of the most important things in the daily life of your community.»
I am sure he was thinking of smaller things. He talked about rural Canadians needing transportation to somewhere else to do their banking or send their mail. He believed that a politician who let that happen was crazy. He believed that if it did happen it would have a profound effect on the security of the small communities that counted on those things.
Does that still resonate in rural areas?
Ms. Mitchell: In our dialogues this is always raised. We hear about the challenge of keeping schools open. We have tracked mail service as the issue has evolved and while the moratorium was in place. Schools and hospitals are in the provincial jurisdiction but they are still government institutions, and people view them as important to their viability.
From our perspective, if that is the way people see their lives, then it is valid. If the population is diminishing and banks are moving out because they do not see themselves serving those small communities in the way they used to, is there a way to replace them? Are credit unions moving in? Are those kinds of services for businesses made available in different ways? Does the technology only partially help; does it help some people and not others?
I agree with you. I am sure that you will hear from rural citizens about which institutions are still available to them. I do not have a prescription for that. That is a policy issue that people have made decisions on. I can only relate to you the situation as I hear it.
The Chairman: I want to thank you very much. You have taken us on a bit of a journey tonight. I am sure that all members of the committee will be looking for more information and I know that we can count on you for that. You have not seen the last of us and we hope that we have not seen the last of you. This will be quite a year for us. We will be the learners and will need all the advice and help we can get to make this a successful study.
The committee continued in camera.