Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 10 - Evidence - Meeting of October 31, 2006
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 7:02 p.m. to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
The Chairman: Good evening honourable senators and witnesses, and good evening to all of those 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 the rural poor has been largely ignored by policy- makers and politicians. Until the end of the year, our committee will hear from a variety of different witnesses who will give us an overview of poverty in Canada's rural areas. This work will then serve as a basis for the committee's planned travel to rural communities all across this country next year.
To date, the committee has learned that rural poverty is a multi-faceted problem. The rural poor suffer disparities in income, access to services, economic opportunities and health outcomes. Today's witnesses are from the University of Guelph, which is well known both in and outside of our country for its focus on rural and agricultural issues.
Professor Anthony Fuller, who is semi-retired — but probably not — has devoted his career as a geographer to researching issues around rural community development, the provision of social services in rural areas, rural restructuring and rural transportation.
Professor Harry Cummings is also a geographer. His research focuses on rural and regional economic development, and on developing methods for evaluating government programs. Mr. Cummings has recently been involved in a province-wide study of Ontario's agriculture and rural economy, which will be helpful to this committee.
I welcome you both. We have two hours tonight with our witnesses. I invite my colleagues to keep their questions as brief as possible in order to allow the witnesses to respond as fully as they wish, and for every one to be able to contribute to the discussion of this particular meeting.
Harry Cummings, Professor, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph, as an individual: Thank you, I am pleased to be able to present tonight on important issues concerning rural poverty in Canada.
I started my career in Ottawa with the Canada Council on Rural Development, advising the Ministry of Forestry and Rural Development in the 1970s on regional and rural issues. To some degree, I return today, some 25 years later, still focused on the rural question.
The Chairman: Who was that minister?
Mr. Cummings: I could not tell you the name of the minister of the day. There were some incredibly strong people at the time, and there were probably a number of ministers during that period.
I return today to address some of the issues around rural poverty, drawing on that experience and a lot of experience in between. Mr. Fuller and I have had a chance to work together on many occasions and share opinions. We hope that we can complement our story lines by covering the spectrum of issues that one faces while living in rural poverty. I will provide more of an overview and Mr. Fuller will focus on a particular issue with respect to rural poverty.
The committee provided me with a number of questions and I have structured my presentation around them. They focused on definitions of "rural'' and "poverty,'' the role of agriculture in rural poverty and other particular strategies and policies that might address rural poverty issues.
First, there is no one measure of poverty. I see poverty as a multi-faceted phenomenon that affects people in many ways, not just in the income they earn but in the lives that they live. If we turn to income, there are three commonly used definitions of poverty in the Canadian context: the low-income cut-off, the low-income measure and the market- based measure. On two of those three measures, rural Canadians are not as well off as urban Canadians, in the general way of speaking.
Rural poverty is associated with the characteristics of particular groups who live and work in rural areas to the extent that they can, and their characteristics make it particularly difficult for them to make ends meet in a rural setting. Those groups would include single female-headed households, in particular, and women in general. If you are a senior and a woman, or if you are a woman employed in the workforce, or if you are a single female or, indeed, any single individual in a household, then you are more likely to be poorer than someone else. Immigrants who choose to settle in rural areas also are more likely to have difficulty finding jobs and are more likely to be unemployed.
Aboriginal Canadians are associated with remote and rural locations — by "remote,'' I mean not adjacent to metropolitan centres. I am working with the Chippewas of Nawash at Cape Croker, which is 40 kilometres to the nearest hospital and 80 kilometres to the nearest old folks home. Looking after the needs of that community means that there is a significant transportation cost incurred by that community to try to provide reasonable services. In that case, there is some assistance provided; but in many rural communities, getting to those services if you are a senior, involves costs and difficulties that may mean, on many occasions, that you simply do not use the service that is available. Children are less likely to have services. In Ontario, we have the Early Years Centres that serve children under five. There is no access to this program in remote rural communities because it only exists in urban centres, remote from where I may live. If I am an adult in need of counselling assistance for health or mental issues, then I have to travel out of my community to an urban centre, incur the costs associated, and the inconvenience of accessing that service. Many times, that means I do not use the service or I use it rarely.
Individuals in the resource-based sectors face cyclical incomes. We have price fluctuations and boom and bust economies. People on farms and resource-based sectors suffer when prices go up and down, largely beyond their control, because they are in sectors where prices are dictated by international trade.
There are groups associated with certain kinds of services that we take for granted, for example, education. The education level of rural people is generally lower and they are less likely to go to university. Youth are more likely to leave; rural out-migration is associated with rural areas. Health services, legal services, and multicultural services for immigrants are more difficult to access in a rural community setting.
The major characteristic of what makes rural living unique is distance. By living in a particular location, we have a set of characteristics that makes us rural and affects the lives we lead. Being remote and rural leads to, and is associated with, lower education levels; poorer health; lower wages for women; fewer services for immigrants; fewer services for seniors; and, fewer services for children, particularly those under five years of age. You are "rural'' by definition if you are remote, isolated, and experiencing lower levels of wages and fewer services. This is all part of the rural picture.
In terms of defining poverty, then, we need a composite picture. I am thinking of an index that would combine health, education, income, work and demographic characteristics of the population.
I am reminded of my early days in Ottawa when ARDA was involved with programs associated with poverty and income issues. We produced maps of indicators of disadvantage and from that mp identified communities where we needed to target our programming. Mapping of poverty levels on a composite map made up of a variety of factors is the way I would identify poverty. We would include social and economic indicators and a variety of associated factors.
With regard to farming and poverty, a small percent of rural is agriculture, although if we look at, to use economic jargon, the multiplier effect of rural is much more important. In a rural county like Huron County in Ontario, we have an agricultural economy that generates over $2 billion a year in revenues based on $600,000 a year in sales, a multiplier of two, three or four depending on where you live. The 20 per cent of people who work in the farm sector along with the 20 per cent who are supported by work in the farm sector, indicate communities where agriculture is still a mainstay. Those are not all counties or areas in Ontario, but indeed many areas are like that.
Within that group, we find that even with those significant levels of employment, the population of farming is aging. The statistics show that 20 per cent of operators were under 35 years of age in 1991 and only 12 per cent were under 35 years of age in 2001. We have an aging farm population that is not attracting young people for a variety of reasons. In many cases, I find farmers telling their children not to farm because they would not like their children to have the life that they have had. I constantly hear this story from people who are struggling to make ends meet in the farm setting. Less than 20 per cent report the majority of their income from farming. That means over 80 per cent report significant levels of off-farm income yet our agricultural, social and economic policies tend to ignore this new agricultural reality.
Farming is seen as a life with few prospects where depression, crisis and/or debt seriously impact many farm families. Youth are discouraged from entering the business and off-farm work is a mainstay. I am sure you have all heard farmers work off the farm in order that they can spend the money on the farm. In that way, the farmer keeps the farm running.
We need those part-time farmers or farmers with off-farm income because they are still stewards of our land. Agricultural land is the backbone of much of our rural society. Certainly, if you look at our southern Ontario and southern Canadian landscape, it is hard to imagine a landscape without agriculture. We need to support that work. Those people cannot invest in the future because of the high costs of new land, new equipment and capital. They lack the security in a boom and bust economy; the security of future income to allow them to make investments that they feel they can pay off. The exception might be dairy farmers where they receive a monthly cheque and have a high quota. A friend of mine and his wife, their daughter and her husband carry a mortgage of $1.75 million on their property. It is a 200-acre dairy farm in Huron County. In order to have a future they felt they had to expand and go high-tech and now they have a huge mortgage on that property.
I should not forget the current crises associated with avian flu, BSE and other crises that affect our sectors so desperately.
Short-term poverty and farming is affected by climate, commodity prices, emerging concerns about the safety of our food system and the food that is in it. While farmers depend on off-farm income, communities change, factories close; jobs move out and affect the viability of the agricultural community because the off-farm work opportunities are removed.
When we look at long-term issues of poverty in agriculture, we think about a cost-price squeeze with costs going up at a rate that is not supported by the margins we gain on the sale of our commodities. That contributes to the growing size of commercial operations. Large commercial farms are viewed as being the only way that the people see the prospects of some day earning enough to support the family with farm income.
We have the cost of capital and the cost of land. The Toronto green belt and associated activity is largely about land prices that have been driven through the roof. This means that I cannot buy the land to farm and make enough to pay off the debt. I have to somehow rent or inherit land and then find my way around the planning legislation to do that.
The significant costs associated with the agricultural business for land, equipment and buildings keeps pushing people in two directions. People are forced to move to smaller, part-time operations or to very large commercial operations, where they rent land, equipment and buildings because they cannot afford to buy. There is also the increasing globalization of the agricultural sector such that Ontario and Canada compete against the world in a policy environment that is far from a level playing field. Countries set policies and we are left to negotiate the appropriate arrangements for our agricultural communities in the face of persistent policies that seem to favour other countries and other opportunities.
Rural is not an absolute condition but a continuum. We need to be sensitive in general to the place in which people live and perform virtually all our work, not just in agriculture and social policy. To some degree, this chart, extracted from Statistics Canada that continuum. You will see that we have rural northern, rural non-metropolitan adjacent regions, and rural metropolitan adjacent regions. There might be growth in one area but there is also out-migration from the non-metropolitan regions.
There is migration from the city to the rural metro-adjacent regions as people look for nice places to live in the countryside. Of course, the planners and the farmers and the non-farm residents end up fighting with planning commissions over the right to farm, land use policies, and working conditions. Indeed, it is not one place but rather it is a continuum from large metropolitan to remote northern and rural. Canada's policy needs to reflect that continuum.
To segue into Mr. Fuller's presentation around transportation, accessibility is a major factor and we need our policy to be sensitive to the limited situations with respect to that accessibility. Jobs and markets need to be accessible. Farmers are increasingly looking for inputs beyond their communities as fewer farmers lead to fewer people and fewer suppliers for their services. They need to find support services wherever they are, for which travel and distance are factors. Family and personal support is a major issue affecting rural residents.
In conclusion, place makes a difference in policy and programming, particularly in the context of rural poverty. There is no one definition of "poverty.'' Even if we stick to income only, there are still at least three definitions. I would encourage looking at not only the one definition and what it shows us, but combine income with social and economic characteristics to map the picture of Canada and the relative existence of poverty and the low, medium, and high incomes across the country.
In respect of rural as a continuum, policy must be sensitive to the differing situations from metropolitan to remote. My favourite example is the need for sensitivity to differing situations in developing energy policy. Just imagine an energy policy that did not take into account the places in which we live and the access, or lack thereof, to energy because of the various living conditions.
Particular groups are affected by poverty. To a large degree, these groups are not distinct from what we might experience in an urban setting, but their situation is made unique by their locations. The examples are the single-parent household without a neighbour or other support and the poorly educated person who does not know where to turn for a job. We find examples in the business that wants to settle in a rural setting but cannot find sufficiently educated or a management-level workforce to run the business and children who do not have access to many of the services that urban children enjoy. I live in Guelph where I have the benefit of a university daycare program and an after-school program for my daughter. However, if I lived in a northern community, I would not have that access. Other groups include seniors with health concerns and immigrants trying to settle into an area where perhaps the necessary multicultural support is not available, and if it is available, it is only on the Web, in English, perhaps. Those are some of the pictures of rural and poverty that I see. I would be pleased to answer questions.
Anthony Fuller, Professor, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph, as an individual: I thank the members of the Senate committee for the opportunity to appear today. It is a pleasure to come to Ottawa and because it is Halloween, I will begin with a short story.
This topic is hard to grapple with and I do not envy senators their job of being witness to the many different presentations during the committee's deliberations to try to predict, for example, the level and direction of future rural poverty. Where will the poverty in rural Canada be tomorrow and in 10-25 years? Who will be the poor in the years to come and why? If we are able to predict with any sense of accuracy then we might be able to do something about it now so that we might avoid, minimize or ameliorate the outcomes.
Prediction is a tricky business. I am happy to say that Mr. Cummings and I do not predict frequently because it is so difficult. Of course, many things ride on predictions and that brings me to my short story, which is about mindset, and how we think about things and what we think about in our understanding of poverty. This story goes back to my childhood in England. It begins with a working-class man, who wakes up at five o'clock in the morning one day, although he normally wakes up at seven o'clock; that in itself is unusual. He says, I am awake, I will get up. He goes downstairs, opens the front door to get the two bottles of milk that are delivered to the front door of each household and sees that there are not two bottles but five bottles. He says, well, that is very nice. He picks up the milk and does what all British people do — he makes a cup of tea. He opens his newspaper and looks across the top to read that it is the fifth day of the fifth month of 1955. If you have been following the story carefully, then you have noticed that the number five is occurring frequently. He wakes up at five; there are five bottles of milk, when there should be two; it is the fifth day of the fifth month. Being a working class fellow, he likes to go to the racetrack to have a little gamble, which many poor people do, or did at that time, in Britain. He decides not to go to work that day and takes a five- pound note from the biscuit tin — a lot of money in those days. He waits patiently until the afternoon, takes a number five bus to the racetrack, looks at the turnstiles and makes sure he goes in the fifth turnstile to get into the racecourse. He is very good, does not spend his money in the afternoon, waits until the fifth race, takes his five-pound note and puts it on horse number five. The horse comes in fifth.
On your way home, think about the way you expected the story to end. What prediction did you have in mind, given the circumstances of the story? A lot of that has to say about how we think about the conditions in which people find themselves. It is not our condition, usually. I do not think anyone here would be classified as poor. Projecting ourselves into other people's lives and imagining their outcomes and the way they do things is difficult. Probably, many of you were hoping or expecting the number five horse to win. Possibly you were using the logic of hope whereas, it was perfectly logical that the horse would come in fifth. There is a suspension between the hope and the logic. How much hope is there among the poor? We can perhaps ponder that question.
My talk is in two parts. I want to drill down, as opposed to going across the spectrum which Mr. Cummings has done, into one subject area in two parts. The first part is to establish how much evidence we have of the transportation link to rural poverty. In the second part, I want to make one or two cautious suggestions about solutions to some of the rural poverty, which is created and sustained by lack of access to transportation and individual mobility.
It is easy to get one's head around this whole idea by thinking about getting around in rural Canada. Getting around and covering the distances that Mr. Cummings talked about is crucial. If one does not get around, then one is not normal in rural areas. One does not have a normal life if one cannot get around. It is essential to be able to get around for accessing all the normal things in life.
To participate in the labour-market, one has to get around, as well as for participating in the voluntary sector. Many rural people like to volunteer, are expected to volunteer, and almost all voluntary activities require getting to a location in order to volunteer. It is hard to volunteer right in one's own home, although it is possible, but I would imagine somewhere in the order of 90 per cent of all voluntary activity takes place outside the home.
One has to get around to access goods for household maintenance, shopping and all the things that are required to sustain a household. One has to get around to access the services which sustain the social viability of households, such as education and health advisory services. Finally, one has to get around for the socialization of household members, especially for children and seniors, who are dependent more often than not on adults for rides to the things in which they want to engage. Getting around is quite important, but why is it important and why is it a problem? You can say that we all get around and we all do those things.
In the past, we had a system that was very efficient and very effective. The nineteenth century landscape developed by focusing on one town or settlement, which was predicated on the distance that a horse could pull a carriage or a cart or a conveyance, into town, where one would rest the horses while working, shopping, going to the mill or the provisions store and get back to the farm by evening. The horses could manage it both ways, even in the wintertime with sleighs. Everything was dependent on one town or one centre, and the social and institutional life and economic activity would be circumscribed around that one town. You would meet your future spouse there; you would go to church there; your school would be there; and, all the services would be in one place. This would be called the "short- distance society,'' because it was always a short distance to where you wanted to go and back home again by evening or before dark.
Today, places are set out on the landscape of 150 years ago, and they all have activities in them, services that people feel are quite normal to access to sustain a livelihood. The pattern of movement is not into just one place, because you do not have the hospital, the school, the lawyer's office, the feed mill and the coffee shop all in one place anymore. School might be in one place for a younger child, and high school will be somewhere else. In the evening, a man will go to, say, the dairy farmers' association and a daughter might go to French immersion or 4-H in a different town. How do all the members of the household get to all of these places without an enormous amount of mileage? Your spheres of activity are not prescribed by one circle or close to one area but are all over the place. One could even go to Costa Rica to see the parrots to socialize, have recreational opportunities and so forth. This is the "open society'' where things are wide open whereas before, they were much more closed around one community.
To be normal today in a rural area, one is expected to be able to access the goods, services and the things that are on offer, for example, the labour-market. This is illustrated in the graph in the bottom left corner where there are many little places and things that are separate from each other. This is a crucial understanding of rural Saskatchewan. It is all in a linear shape. If it is in Nova Scotia, it is like that. If it is in Northern Ontario, it is like that. In the middle part of British Columbia, places are separate from each other, and they all have different sorts of services that people require to make a life.
If one does not have access to a car or a truck, then one is stuck because there is no public transportation. If one does not have access to a car or a truck in rural Canada, then one does not participate in that bottom left hand circle very much. One might participate to some degree, but not as much as other people do or as is considered to be normal.
It is a major feature that public transportation is not a possibility for many households or hardly any households. There are a few taxis around, and, of course, if one lives in a town, one can walk to several of these things, if it is not winter and if one is not infirm or elderly. One can bicycle, which is good thing for youngsters to do. I am not sure how many bicycles there are in our rural small towns. Bicycle riding is not a habit in small-town areas.
The first conclusion that I would draw to your attention is that getting around in rural Canada is almost totally dependent on accessing automotive transportation. It is as simple as that. I think this is, therefore, going to impoverish people by dint of the fact that they cannot get around as much as perhaps they would like, or they are expected to, to be citizens of our nation to do what we would expect most people to do — to have a job, to look after themselves, to participate in public voluntary activity and so forth.
In particular, however, rural youth are affected by this more than some of the others. So are the elderly, for obvious reasons. Some people do not have licences; many women in this generation do not drive, never did drive and have spent most of their lives being driven by menfolk in the households. Women are outliving men by at least 10 years in the elderly categories, and many women who do not get around much. Then there are single parents. As Mr. Cummings has mentioned, these are female, in particular. Women, in general, as it turns out, are an invisible group in relation to transportation. For example, if there is one car in a rural household and it is a two-adult household, often the male partner will take the car to work first thing in the morning and will come home later in the afternoon or in the early evening. All during the day, a woman, who may have young children or an elderly person to provide for, is on her own for the whole of the day, except the weekends perhaps. In a study of community abuse, the flash points in abusive relationships were often about who gets the keys to the single car in the household. It is very easy for males to commandeer the keys and therefore trap females in remote, isolated, rural situations. Car keys become difficult items. This is just one example of car-related stress.
What do we know about this? I am not giving you any numbers. I am sure people have given you many numbers and graphs, but I cannot give them to you because we do not know. I am sure you all have an impression of what I am saying. You probably have personal anecdotal evidence; I certainly do — bits and pieces of studies here and there, but nothing where I can be systematic about rural Canada and present data on this subject. It is missing, but I recommend that we think about it in various ways.
Getting around is not an equal opportunity. It is very much a diversified — what we call in our jargon, "differentiated'' access to the automobile.
Does location matter? RNF means a rural non-farm, or if you live on a farm, or in the village or town and in any one of those categories — a youth, elder, single parent or a woman — what difference would it make? You do not have to answer that. The point is we could answer it if we had the opportunity to do a systematic study and establish whether location really matter in terms of access to transportation.
Perhaps other things matter, such as trip type. Rural youth getting to work, or provisioning for the household, or getting to services for the elderly, single parents or women, how does that affect access to transportation? Another possibility is to look at how long it takes the youth, elderly, parents and women to get to any of those places, and what is the cost? It is not the same matter as it is in the city. My colleagues in Kitchener-Waterloo know exactly what it takes for a poor family to make X number of bus trips per week to get to health, education and social services, but we do not have a bus in a rural area. We do not know what it costs, how long it takes, who gets to go, who drives whom, how many times they go or, as Mr. Cummings has indicated — and I am sure he is quite right — how many trips you do not make because you cannot get there or it is too much trouble. What are you going to do with the children to make these trips? Where is the daycare?
I think there is a lot to be learned about the situation, which I think all would agree is important, and yet we really do not have much systematic evidence. We cannot find any information in the census because that type of data is not measured in it. The census is only every five years anyway. This should be in the social survey, which is conducted each year and some elements of it are every quarter. We need better information about the conditions for people in rural areas — and I would argue that transportation is one of them — so that we can answer some of our own questions.
My third conclusion is that research is needed to provide basic data. This is not fancy data I am talking about; this is descriptive information.
Those are the questions that arise about what we know and what we do not know. I would like to say a couple of words about transportation solutions and services.
On the next page, you can see one county in Ontario and all of the transportation services that are available in that area. The message is that it there are services out there, in what we call "civil society.'' These local organizations and groups provide transportation services and there are many of them. The situation is not as bleak as one might first imagine.
If you have lived or participated in a rural area for any length of time, you will know that you can get a ride to church on a Sunday. Most people will pick you up and take you to church. Many services are delivered to you, as well, like Meals on Wheels, which is transportation. The Red Cross takes cancer patients, for a fee, to cancer treatment centres in London, if it is in my area, or they take stroke patients to the swimming pools. There are many transportation services, but they provide service for a particular group. Their mandate, and often their insurance and the conditions in which they drive someone to a service, will include only those people who have the problem or the need or the desire to use the service. They are not allowed, even though they may have an empty van or car with only one person in it, to pick someone else up and drop them off. To get to work when your car is in the garage or when you cannot afford to put gas in it, or just had to let the insurance lapse, becomes a major problem for some rural citizens. I could say there are a whole variety of vehicles running around out there with people in them, going to valid, useful services, but they are not allowed to pick up other people.
Until we do a more careful study I am not sure who falls between the cracks. It is a nice diagram for thinking about the cracks. Who does not get to participate in one of these services? The point is that you almost have to have something wrong with you before you get a ride.
A working woman who has a low-income job at Tim Hortons, for example, does not have a service that will get her to work. How does a 19-year old working at Tim Hortons on a shift that stops at midnight get home if he or she lives in the country? There is not a Tim Hortons ride service on this chart; however, it might be a good idea to suggest that to the private sector. We are not saying there are not transportation services, but they do not clearly explain who gets to ride and who does not.
There are two key requirements for any provision of service in rural areas around transportation. First, core funding is essential for at least one permanent full-time staff. We know from all sorts of studies across Canada, in many different universities and organizations, that without one permanent member, an organization struggles to provide the service that often it is looking for its next funding and does not deliver the service particularly well. One person needs to be there all the time and to be the go-to person for that organization. Second, start-up and provisional funding for a service for transportation is important.
Any transportation service must be complementary and consistent with local conditions. We cannot develop a model in Ottawa or at the University of Guelph and impose it on all rural communities. Those sorts of things do not work in rural areas. They do not work generally, in my understanding, but they certainly will not work in rural areas. There must be some way of fitting into and improving the situation that exists in rural areas. There are all sorts of different ways to consider what a community can do, but the community has to decide how to do it on its own. The community will need some support and assistance to keep someone in charge on a full-time basis.
We need to provide support for groups and organizations that already provide rides. These groups are struggling, they are always going under and they are having a terrible time keeping their vehicles on the road or serviced or safe. An option is to develop a central ride service to fill in the gaps and complement existing services. An integrated approach to this might be possible if you consider that the voluntary sector and the local providers, who know the situation and are well imbedded in providing many of these rides, would provide the service. This is a provincial responsibility because transportation is a provincial responsibility in terms of buses, the licensing of taxis or conditions that provide vehicles for public transport. The provincial responsibility to do that might be supported by such agencies as HRSDC, and potentially the Community Futures Program, where CFDCS could provide business start-up loans. Perhaps, private business would make transportation services feasible.
It is within the federal agencies to consider support from all levels of government then, because clearly at the local level the municipality would be one of the partners in a local service provision. Provincial agencies need to address and be involved in this process. We have had some experience with this in Ontario in that you cannot solve insurance problems at the local level. That is a province-wide jurisdiction. Things can be done to change insurance conditions. For example, if a transportation service is driving people and the driver receives a little bit of recompense for the gasoline, the driver is in a very vulnerable position in terms of insurance should there be an accident. Provincial agencies can and have shown that they can deal with this situation. This is not easy, but it needs to be done. The provincial partner has a role in insurance provision. If one wants to do anything around getting access to school buses, one must deal with the school board, education ministry at the provincial level, and bus and taxi licensing.
Are you aware that in a rural area you can get a taxi in a town to go out to your rural non-farm, but the taxi cannot come out from the town to pick you up from your rural non-farm? It is not licensed to do that. It has to take you out from the town to home but cannot take you into town. That is one of those antiquated pieces of taxi law about licensing, to make it fair for taxi providers to have equal opportunity for provision. The provincial agencies can resolve all sorts of quirky things in the system.
Do you remember the illustration showing where one needs to go to function in a society? Getting around like that is not green. I sat through almost two and a half hours yesterday at Statistics Canada listening to a speaker from Britain. If you have been reading the newspapers, you will know that Britain is very concerned about climate change right now. This speaker was from the rural conservation commission and his mandate was to deflect the pressure that rural England is unsustainable because of all the driving and commuting. There is a great deal of concern about people commuting from rural areas into the towns, or between rural areas. The concern is that it is unsustainable in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the use of automobiles, which contain only one commuter.
The opportunity is to provide collective rides. One could come up with services which would have two or three people in a car or a van instead of just one person. If one encouraged or even considered the efficacy of legislation of some sort of incentives to use efficient fuels, they would not be driving around in an SUV, but driving people around in a van that is already equipped for biofuel. At the same time, as you are saving on energy and have better gas emissions, you are also supporting the local farm population, which is partly dependent on producing crops for biofuels.
I would urge that we would see the transportation issue as an opportunity to do several things at the same time. We could get out of the green dilemma, which is very serious. If England is unsustainable from a fuel point of view, how on earth will we sustain rural Canada, where the distances are twice as long and places twice as scattered?
I think there are possibilities of killing two or three birds with one stone. I do not know if you see that picture as a fork in the road or if you see that as the beginning of a journey or an end of a journey. We are back to how you see things and I hope that I have been able to influence you a little bit in that regard.
Senator Callbeck: Professor Cummings, you mentioned immigration several times. I come from a rural area, namely, Prince Edward Island. How do we encourage immigrants to settle in rural Canada? About 90 per cent of our immigrants immigrate to British Columbia, Ontario or Quebec and settle in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. Atlantic Canada gets very few immigrants. In my own province, we are facing the doubling of our senior population by 2026 at which time it will be 28 per cent of the total population and the number of children under 14 years of age will be less than the number of seniors.
We certainly must have more immigration. Can the federal government accomplish this goal through immigration policies? We had a witness here last week from Mount Allison, Professor David Bruce, who did a study on rural depopulation in Atlantic Canada. In that study, he talked about "welcoming communities,'' which involves more than being a friendly community in that you have jobs, housing and other services, such as English language classes and so forth, available for the immigrants.
Can the federal government play a role? How do we encourage immigrants to come to rural Canada?
Mr. Cummings: I will speak on the basis of my experience. I did a green paper on immigration policy for the Canadian Council on Rural Development in the 1970s as part of a national study on immigration, working with the president of the women's institute from Nova Scotia. More recently, I did a study of immigration to rural areas in Ontario. I do not know if I can find the green paper study; it must be in my archives or somewhere in the library. Mr. Fuller has one. I have a web copy of the Ontario study. Immigration services are set up in metropolitan reception centres and immigrants have to go to the metropolitan reception centres and be disbursed from there.
I will speak about Northern Ontario because we did focus groups in those communities. There is not a cross-cultural centre or the equivalent in a rural community, so you have to find an organization that is willing to provide some cultural services, probably on a part-time basis because there is not enough activity for a full-time service provider. You need to support community services for immigrants through existing community organizations. They need to reflect an orientation toward the cross-cultural settings, people of diverse languages and orientations. You need to provide support for that in whatever package. It should not have to be in a large organization where you can have a full-time staff member providing it. It should be part of a person's job or in a package that is divisible into units that suit the needs of the community in which they are based.
At the job level, we found that people are going to jobs where their friends or a previous acquaintance has found work, so the network they are using is a friendship network. Once they are there, if that friend is not well-connected, they often do not know where to turn. If the friend or acquaintance has not in the community for a long time, and there is an issue around jobs, or finding a doctor, the immigrant does not know where to turn. How does a new immigrant to a rural community find a doctor if local services are unavailable? ESL services are increasingly not available in these communities. Now two services are needed: the cross-cultural service and the ESL service. They do not have to be big and expensive. We can find them in units which are divisible to meet the needs of the community.
The immigrants have to get on the web to find the service models and more often than not, the immigrant cannot speak English and may not be web savvy. I know we are trying to promote e-services to rural residents, but in many cases we are still dealing with dial-up and, with the complications of language issues, they were not using the service. We asked what services they used, and they told us they used friends, families and connections because no others were available in those communities.
My advice would be to find appropriate ways of dividing the service package so you can take a part of the person's time to do cross-cultural work, a part for ESL and a job assistance component, which you integrate with an existing organization.
You have hit on a topic I have been researching for the last little while.
Senator Callbeck: Do you know of any rural areas in Canada that have been successful in keeping immigrants?
Mr. Cummings: It tends to be areas where there is prior immigration experience with a sufficient mass of a particular group of people. That tends to be where it is successful, where you have Dutch, Germans, Vietnamese or Finns.
Mr. Fuller: There is a classic example in Winkler, in southern Manitoba. The people who run the plant go overseas to recruit directly and bring people to Winkler. Once they have the critical mass, people know there are others there from their country. It seems to work. Almost one-third of their population has come in the last five years.
Mr. Cummings: There is a newly emerging successful model, which is the independent entrepreneur running the convenience store. Increasingly, immigrants are taking over gas stations and corner stores. In Magnetawan, the local general store is now run by an immigrant family and doing a very good job.
Mr. Fuller: It takes time.
Mr. Cummings: The support services were not there. Those focus groups in Northern Ontario were not getting any support from our national immigration services. They were making it on their own or through the goodness of the hearts of people in the community.
Mr. Fuller: They just closed one down around Guelph because there was not enough traffic. People in Rockwood have to go to Guelph, and they are talking about closing the one in Guelph, which is a community of 100,000 people.
Mr. Cummings: The Internet is not a replacement for these services.
Senator Segal: I want to connect the dots between Professor Cummings' reference to place-based policy, Professor Fuller's assessment of the geophysical transportation problem, as it exists for isolated folks and an issue raised with us last week by a member of the academy who is joint appointed at the University of Saskatchewan and Ohio. He talked about the importance of economic clusters in rural Canada that allowed sources of non-agricultural income to expand to assist the rural population in meeting its income requirements.
I would ask the witnesses to venture separately into the area of possibilities relative to policy design. I read Professor Fuller's list of suggested items that might be addressed across a broad spectrum of federal, provincial, municipal and county jurisdictions, such as licensing, et cetera. While I am a great believer in government, on occasion some things are so minute and detailed by their very nature that it is difficult for government, even with the best of faith and the most elaborate of funding, to achieve the goal. I am searching for the easily accessible instruments of public policy that could make a true difference in a reasonably proximate period of time; for example, if we went to an earned-income supplement that would provide to all working Canadians below the low-income cut-off a refundable tax supplement to bring them over the line. That would be a factor for areas such as rental subsidies for seniors and other programs already in place. Enlightened governments have moved large departments with large employee bases — back-office operations — to places like Summerside, Kingston and North Bay, for good and substantial reason. In that way, a critical mass of jobs is created to allow one of the people living on the farm or in the rural household an extra source of income not generated from farming activity because of a particular pricing or commodity cycle as it might advance.
I am interested in your sense of this because you have been around this tree many times. You have looked at what is doable from many different perspectives, not what is perfect. What would be the best possible policy design? I would ask that you be as frank and open as you have been with us about the nature of the problem and the challenge. I would be interested in your assessment of what you think is doable by government, even with the best of intentions at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. How would you begin if you had to do one significant thing over the next 24 months to make a true, measurable difference in the lives of the rural core? This should be based on what you understand about the dynamics, understanding that there are differences from place to place based on family formation, demographics and economic bases. Taking all of that into consideration, what would you recommend? What advice would you offer to the committee?
I understand that you were asked to give us an analysis, not policy prescription, but I trying to push back a little bit to see if you want to venture into that territory.
Mr. Fuller: That is the wicked question: What to do in 24 months? I am only glad that we have 24 months and not six months.
It is my understanding of rural areas including Europe is that they are quite particular systems. I am sure that cities are too. The nature of rural places and the way they work and do not work and how they figure things out and do things is very particular to the various regions of the country. The LEADER program in Europe and our Community Futures Program steadily impress me. In each of these programs, the central government provides a certain amount of funding and some basic rules of the game to stimulate the programs, and then, for all intents and purposes, governments get out of the way. This allows the fundamental truth about rural communities to operate: they can figure it out if they have a bit of incentive or a piece of space and some resources to do it. They are capable of taking care of many of their own ideas.
My advocacy in terms of government intervention would not be to do programming, which delivers something specific and creates issues because of targeting to ensure that the right people get the right piece, but to send some resources to areas where we know that there are many poor people. We cannot just build a nicer town hall.
We must trust Canadian citizens to do what needs doing if they have the proper resources and then provide some of the means to get it done. They have to be accountable for what they receive from government but essentially, government gets out of the way. We do not need agents out there to do everything for them. That is my advocacy.
Mr. Cummings: I will take a slightly different tack. There is good research evidence and good common sense evidence on minimum income policies, such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement in Canada based in Western Canada, as I recall.
Senator Segal: It was in Manitoba.
Mr. Cummings: Canada's current social welfare policy, whether through the GIS or other policies, has cut back the basic support that families need to a place that is not sustainable. I would look at trying to manage something more sustainable in that area, either through the income supplement vehicle or through a way to administer the needs test in a reasonable way such that we support the families at a reasonable level that they need. Although we have had a tremendous decrease in welfare payments over the last 10 years, there is good research evidence to support the fact that those people pushed off welfare in many situations have been forced into severe poverty. Some of those people have made it out of poverty but about 25 per cent of them have gone down the tubes, likely in a way that they would not have if we had not been so aggressive in cutting back our payments to families in need.
I am attracted to policies that are more specific to place. I used to speak about the tyranny of averages. My county, Huron County, was never eligible for assistance from the former Department of Regional Expansion because we were a part of that rich province, Ontario. When I compared Huron County 20 years ago to areas of Newfoundland and Labrador, the people of Huron had lower social statistics but we did not qualify because the province did not qualify. We have gotten better at it and the Community Futures Program is one example whereby we allow local programming initiatives to adjust for the situations in which they occur, but there is still more room for change.
It is not complicated to do programming that is more sensitive to the space, and Canada is known for its wide-open spaces. I would do those two things.
Senator Milne: I am new to this committee and filling in for a regular member. However, some of the things that you said intrigue me.
Professor Fuller, you asked for a prediction of the future. It was not too long ago that you could see most of Canada's first-class agricultural land from the top of the CN Tower in downtown Toronto. That land is now pretty well growing a crop of cement, asphalt and houses. Our cities keep spreading out over our best agricultural land. In northern Ontario, in the last few months, the province has lost something like 6,000 jobs in the lumber sector alone. I have heard it predicted that if the Canadian Wheat Board were destroyed, it would cost Western farmers between $320 million to $650 million in income per year. I see nowhere for rural poverty to go but up. We are destroying our best land and we are yanking the rug out from under the farmers who are on it.
What is your estimate, Professor Cummings of the average age of farmers? I think the average age is 65 years.
Mr. Cummings: No, the average age is 53 years.
Mr. Fuller: I think it is 55 years, or something like that.
Senator Milne: Since only 5 per cent of Canada is arable land, what percentage of rural residents actually farm? You said it is a very small percentage. What percentage actually does farm?
Mr. Cummings: Out of the total Canadian population, it is around 3 per cent.
Mr. Fuller: I believe it is 2.3 per cent.
Senator Milne: The numbers will decrease, the age will go up and the amount of rural poverty will increase — I am terribly depressed about the whole thing.
Mr. Cummings: In the agriculturally intensive areas, there is 10 per cent to 20 per cent employment in agriculture. We have become a service society, much like the rest of the world.
Senator Milne: You talked about the spin-off values in rural communities from agriculture, which is in the farm equipment industry and all these other jobs. When I look at this bar, I see the rural, metro-adjacent regions with 15 per cent of Canada's population are growing.
Mr. Cummings: Generally, those areas are growing.
Senator Milne: These are the areas where the young people can more easily get jobs off the farm, so they are not going to go back.
Mr. Fuller: That is if they can get to the jobs.
Senator Milne: They will not go back and farm. Historically, they have not. Again, I am sitting here depressed by what I have heard and what I know.
The Chairman: We are sorry that is the case on your first occasion here at this committee; however, it underlines many difficulties and it is tough.
Senator Milne: I am looking for answers, gentlemen.
Mr. Fuller: I do not disagree. I do not want to come across as being flippant, but I believe that it has always been thus.
Senator Milne: Demographic studies, even in the U.K., show that every generation moves 5 miles closer to the closest centre of population.
Mr. Fuller: An historical series of trends show we have been losing farm populations. One of the first commissions I sat on when I came to Canada was farm poverty. At that time, the ARDA program was deliberately moving farmers out of rural areas and joining farms together because they were considered too small. The state actually assisted in the movement of people out of agriculture because it felt there were too many farms. The report at that time was called The Challenge of Abundance.
Even in Canada, we had a policy of moving people off farms and joining farms together. We paid for the farmers retraining and their relocation in all parts of Canada. The cycle goes up and down. I remind senators of the farm crisis of the early 1980s, when interest rates were so high and we lost so many people, both literally and figuratively. Farm crisis comes up cyclically and is governed, in large part, by the entire food industry.
It is happening in the United States; we could have this conversation in France; we would have the same discussion if we were in Italy. The world is shedding its farmers. I do not think we are any different, although the local circumstances might be somewhat different.
We just finished a conference around the Canadian Rural Restructuring Foundation; when we first began, we were called the Agriculture and Rural Restructuring Group. We met in the 1980s, as a result of the farm crisis across Canada. Academics got together on their own ticket; we came together to try to figure out what was going on. Almost everything we did was totally depressing — I am joining you in the depressed state — because the forces that drive the farm economy down are fundamentally international and corporate. We can always ask the political economy question — for everything that is going down, something somewhere is gaining; it is a zero sum sort of game.
I do not think you would find it too depressing if you talked to Cargill, who is the competitor for the Wheat Board.
Senator Milne: Cargill is delighted.
Mr. Fuller: Absolutely, and Cargill employs many Canadians. Many of my students work for Cargill, Monsanto, and all the other organizations that are doing very well in the food industry. The food sector generally is booming and growing. It is vibrant. It is just the farm end that is not having a good time.
Senator Milne: It is supposed to be the bottom of the pyramid, is it not?
Mr. Fuller: When did farmers have a good time? When did we all get together and have a big party because it was boom time in farming?
Senator Gustafson: 1972.
Mr. Fuller: We should remember that, then. Every 10 years after 1972, we should have a celebration. That is about the only time I can remember.
Mr. Cummings: I have a positive spin on this, which is on the Canadian, the farmer, the rural resident as an entrepreneur. Where we are getting jobs and progress is where people are taking it upon themselves to find alternative ways to do business — either farm business or on-farm and related business — because they remain committed to their farming activity and they choose to do interesting and innovative things that they then sell to the world.
One way is to find ways to support that entrepreneurial spirit, wherever it may lie in this country. I am constantly impressed with the innovation that I see in the various corners of Canada. I want to create policy that will allow that innovation to take place. That means that I have to recognize the diversity of rural situations and allow for that — not try to shut everyone into one box and have one set of policies.
In Ontario, one of the areas I am pushing is planning policy, which permits a diversity of rural economic activity to take place, and where our students, who become municipal planners, do not zone alternate activity out.
Senator Milne: They tend to.
Mr. Fuller: They think they are saving farming and it is the wrong thing to do.
Mr. Cummings: In planning we have a new urbanism. I want to create the new ruralism, which is about mixed-use rural countrysides that are supportive of a variety of activities. This allows transition with other activities and supports that transition in the time-honoured way that we support entrepreneurship.
Senator Gustafson: Saskatchewan, with 40 per cent of its arable land, is losing its farmers. Right now there are hundreds of quarters of sections of land that are not even being seeded because there is no one to seed them. This is new in the last two or three years.
I was in the Minister of Agriculture's office in Regina two weeks ago and I asked him if it is as bad in the north as it is in the south? I think the problem is a political problem. Our political parties, whether Conservative or Liberal or NDP, pay no attention, in a real hard sense, to the rural problem that is facing Canada today. We have to start putting something back into rural Canada. but there is really no political incentive for doing it, because all the votes are in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. On the other hand, we are losing our environment. You cannot look after the land unless you have some farmers on it, and they are moving off.
They talk about energy credits and that could be a good answer to the problem. Headlines read in The Globe and Mail yesterday that we are in dire straits in the environment. They talked about billions of dollars to turn this thing around. It would not take that much if we had done it through the land in a proper way.
The other thing is commodity prices. When we haul in a truck-load of wheat, the transportation cost takes half of what we get for the grain just to get it to the Lakehead or to Vancouver. I was in the Weyburn terminal and asked the price of number 1 wheat. It is $1.90 a bushel. In 1972 a barrel of oil was $2 and a bushel of wheat was $2. Today, you might get $3 for the wheat and a barrel of oil is $60. How can you run a system like that? You cannot do it.
You did not come here for me to tell you how to do it, but we will have to do something like the Americans have done.
Mr. Cummings: We will listen to your ideas.
Senator Gustafson: We say we are going to get the Americans off the subsidies. We bought that lie for 20 years, and that is not going to happen. They are increasing the subsidies and they are doing the right thing. However, we in Canada have never really looked at the global situation that we are facing in agriculture. If we did, we would have to do something about it.
Mr. Fuller: You have mentioned part of the solution, because I think the environment is the issue of the day. It is the issue of the decade, maybe the century. The land and the people who occupy the land have a major role to play. The increase in the subsidy that you refer to, certainly in Europe anyway is because Europe is already switching from the blue box to the green box and getting out of commodity support and into environmental support. The Europeans are encouraging landholder's — I use that term because there are people who hold land who do not necessarily farm — and getting them to participate in the EGAS, environmental goods and services. They take care of our rivers, our forests, and our land, as well as take chances in the marketplace with the commodities as well. That is a valid and major contribution that the state can make to the environmental question through the land, and it partly resolves the farming question at the same time. It becomes something like a guaranteed sort of income; however, it is linked to providing services to look after the land in certain ways, which is perhaps not the same.
Senator Gustafson: They have started a program but it is just in the infant stages.
Mr. Fuller: It needs to be pushed. We had a summer school with our Ph.D. students from Europe, U.S.A and Brazil in Brandon Manitoba. Ducks Unlimited and other groups came to talk to us about what they thought would happen to the Prairie farming system and what policy should do about it. The universal response, including from the Ministry of Agriculture in Manitoba, was to get onto the environmental side of the equation, now, and not have another series of debates.
Senator Gustafson: To do that, though, the farmers need capital. They cannot do it without capital and do it properly. A lot of our farmers have now cash-rendered their land out. Many of the farmers are in their 70s. Many of the farmers have sold their machinery; they cannot go back into farming. If commodity prices go any lower than what they are now, we will have chaos in the rural area.
Mr. Fuller: I agree. We cannot do much about commodity prices, but we can transfer certain types of income to farm people to do a different sort of job than they were doing yesterday.
Senator Gustafson: I think we can. In southern Saskatchewan, all the big players built terminals. They are making a killing and they love the Canadian Wheat Board because it keeps them alive. They are taking all the profit out of the grain. Cargill is not going broke. Arthur Daniels Midland is not going broke. I was going to phone Brian Mulroney to see if he will do something about it, he is on the board of directors. It is a challenge.
Mr. Cummings: This is one case where Mr. Fuller and I would agree. Canada has been behind where many other countries have been on this issue of environmental goods and services. We have had programs. One of our colleagues, Stewart Hilts, has been involved in environmental stewardship agreements with farmers where, in fact, farmers agreed to maintain certain areas of their land and certain uses in return for tax and other incentives. There are many reasons to move to environmental goods and services. That could be your 24-month policy, Senator Segal.
Senator Gustafson: The CAIS program was a good example where we have had programs. What did it do? It put in hundreds of people into jobs in Winnipeg but it never put any real money into the farm. They gave them jobs and maybe hired a vote; I do not know. That is what really happened.
Mr. Fuller: Then you factor in climate change.
Senator Christensen: This is more of a brainstorming night than a question and answer night because I do not know if we have any real questions.
The two most interesting words that I have heard tonight and that we probably have to build on are "innovation'' and "value-added'' for rural Canada. We are applying 20th century solutions to 21st century problems. We have to start going outside of the box to deal with these problems and that will take a lot of innovative thinking.
Society has evolved, but our policies have not. We have urban dwellers who want to have a rural lifestyle and rural persons who want the amenities that come with an urban lifestyle. I do not know how we supply all those things.
I come from the Yukon. I am not talking about only agriculture here; I am talking rural-urban because it is a big picture in the North. When I grew up, I lived in a community of 12 people. Our closest doctor was three days away on an overland stage. The expectations today are so much greater; our society has evolved. We used to live as a nuclear unit in which children, adults, working adults and the elderly all lived together and all interchanged with jobs. That does not happen now. Everyone now is departmentalized. Children require kindergarten, then elementary and high school, and the seniors need extra health care, so they are off and not living with their children anymore, or now the children are usually living with them.
Our society has changed so much, but we have not kept up to it as policy-makers. We are still chugging along with the same old policies. We are not keeping up with the public. I am not sure how to do that, but the words "innovation'' and "value-added'' came up tonight.
Lifestyle is important, certainly to the people in the North, where I live. They give up a lot for lifestyle. I am thinking of people that run big game outfits. They work very hard for two months of the year when the game season is on. The rest of the time they are promoting their businesses, and they give up an awful lot to be able to do that. It is the lifestyle that they really enjoy. It is the same with trappers and others. The lifestyle is important to them, and they will do anything they have to in order to keep it. Once they can no longer do that, they want to move. People are constantly moving now. You cannot have a static birth-to-death community where everyone starts and ends in the same place; they have to keep evolving. Our policies have to meet that evolution.
Many people in some areas do not want to meet the requirements. Whitehorse is the major centre that has all of the major requirements for health care for seniors in various stages of need. The smaller communities want those same facilities for maybe three seniors. They do not want to send them away because the families want to be with them. How do you provide nursing care for three to four seniors on a 24-hour basis? First, you cannot get nurses. Those are the sort of things that we have to start addressing outside of the box. How do we do these things?
With respect to immigrants, at the beginning of the 20th century and even before, many immigrants were coming from the rural areas in their home countries. They were being forced off their farms for political reasons, or because their crops were failing, and they had to leave because they were starving. They were rural people and they came to rural areas of Canada.
Most of our immigrants today are coming from the urban areas of their countries. They do not want to go to rural areas because they do not know how to live in those areas. You cannot ask how we get them out of urban areas and into rural areas because they do not transfer.
I do not have the answers. Those are things that we must dwell on, and we must look at innovative and different ways of dealing with those things. It will be difficult, but we certainly have many good minds around, and that is one reason we are having this study because we are bringing in people such as you to stimulate us, and get us thinking, we hope, outside of the box.
Mr. Cummings: I said that the rural area as well as the rest of Canada has become a service economy, and that offers some opportunities. I am doing some work in Chapleau in northern Ontario, and I stay in a renovated egg grading station. It was renovated to become a B&B, and the owner is full of stories. Yes, we have eggs for breakfast — great breakfasts. He survives for part of the year on tourists from the U.S. He has gone from being a farmer and an egg grader with an egg route to running a B&B and living on tourism, including the snowmobile trade. We should do anything we can do to support that sector of the economy. In certain parts of Canada, the tourism sector is a value- added activity. It is a take on the environmental goods and services. It is "we value that experience.''
We are tame in our promotional activities. We are not innovative in the way we promote our countryside and our opportunities. We can support the service sector in a variety of ways. If we do, we will support rural in much of Canada, not everywhere, but certainly in much of Canada.
Senator Callbeck: I have a question about the relationship between the environment and poor farmers. In your opinion, as farmers incomes decrease, is there a greater potential to do harm to the soil and to the watersheds?
Mr. Fuller: There is evidence in Europe that with increasing desperation on farms, people mine the soil. The subsidy situation is based on "the more you grow, the more you get.'' The only way that certain farm people can stay, even with low income is to produce more from the stable resources that they have. There are a number of studies which point out that they apply more fertilizer and take more risks with their land just to produce more. It is important to produce more rather than to produce better; the incentives are in the wrong quadrant. I am unaware of any studies in Canada, although there might be, that show the same thing.
Senator Gustafson: One example is that we have gone to continuous cropping. If you fallow the ground year after year, you bring up the alkali and absolutely destroy the soil. If you cannot afford to farm in the new progressive way of continuous cropping, then they go on summer fallow again. Farmers are going back to that now when they are in tough times, but they should not be doing that.
Mr. Fuller: There is an example that you have reminded me of with that comment: the proposed introduction of the Nutrient Management Act in Ontario. When it was determined what the impact would be on different farm size categories, the poorer farmers were considered the ones who would lose out because they would not be able to afford the upgrades to comply with the act. It would be an imposition on the poor while the wealthier or more capital- intensive organizations would presumably be able to borrow in order to make the changes. It is not necessarily the best idea. That was an effect of proposed policy that is for the good of the environment and society in general, but impacting differentially on the poorer end of the spectrum.
The Chairman: I have been listening to all of this with great interest.
Mr. Fuller: You did not ask a question.
The Chairman: No, I have been listening to the questions and answers and thinking of my area in southwestern Alberta. The people with whom I am close would be a little disappointed in us tonight because before throwing in the hat, they would want to remind us of what is still available. If you like mountains, we have a range; if you like hills, we have the Porcupine Hills; if you like river valleys, Lethbridge is built on the hills of the Old Man River. If you like the prairies, the prairie is right out there on the other side of town. One of the most astounding things about this area — a small city surrounded by historic, innovative towns — is the people. The people are the ones who have to be treated with the greatest sense of advantage that we have in this country. We have the best farmers; we have innovative people; we have clever people. In my area, we have people who do not want to leave. They have survived BSE, the cattle crisis. They were just on the verge of another problem that this committee is helping with — a trade attack from the south on our sugar beet industry. Over the last eight years, we have had some of the worst droughts since the dark days of the 1930s. It goes on and on and yet these people do not want to leave. We have all the things wrong and challenging that everyone has talked about tonight. We also ought to factor in the following: When we look at an issue that seems to be overwhelming, we have to remember the people who are going through it because they are Canada's biggest value. We have to do value-added with them in the same way that we talk of having to do value-added with their products.
That is one of the challenges for this committee. Senator Segal knows more about some of these feelings than others do because he has done his own study. We have to approach this bigger study with a couple of views.
One view is that changing what we have had might be helpful. That is an issue and that is why we have to go out and listen to the people. We need to find out what it is they want us to do to help them to stay on the land, to build their families, to try to sustain their industry, to do value-added, et cetera. We have to keep them on the land.
I thank the witnesses for appearing this evening because they have added a great deal to the committee's deliberations. The challenge over the next year will be to determine how we can retain this part of Canada.
No one knows better than Senator Gustafson how tough it is out there on the land and all that goes with it. However, it is there, we have to keep it and we do not want to see it rolled into urban areas. We want to keep the lands growing and keep the people there who want to stay there.
The committee adjourned.