Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 10 - Evidence - Meeting of November 9, 2006
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 9, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 8 a.m. to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good morning, 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 policy-makers and politicians have ignored the plight of the rural poor. 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 across the country next year. We will hit the road and go to every part of Canada to try and see for ourselves what we have heard in the hearings.
Today we have with us two witnesses who have devoted their careers to studying rural issues and to thinking about ways of ensuring rural Canada's survival. From Alberta, we have Peter Apedaile. Dr. Apedaile is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta's agriculture economics department, a part time grain and oil seeds farmer in Smoky Lake County in the northern part of Alberta, and one of the founders of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation. His work emphasizes the growing linkages between rural economies and the broader global economy, especially in the agricultural area.
From Quebec, we have Bill Reimer who is a Concordia University sociology professor. Dr. Reimer is also actively involved with the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation. He currently serves as the foundation's national research director, and he sits on its board of directors. His research looks at social inclusion and exclusion in rural Canada, especially with respect to access of services.
Welcome, gentlemen. We are very pleased that you have taken the time to come here on this issue.
Peter Apedaile, Professor Emeritus, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta, as an individual: My contribution this morning is not supposed to be exhaustive. There are too many things to talk about. Instead, I will present you with 10 measures that I think policymakers and rural leaders could think about to go straight to the heart of rural poverty issues. This is based on my past experience, and my new political experience as a municipal councillor trying to get this agenda moving through our council.
The first measure is to promote rural/metro alliances. These need to be built around our common interests, and we have to learn, as leaders, from the connectedness of the rural and metro ecologies and economies and the justice issues.
This is based on research that has gone on for quite a long time. I would like to mention something that we are doing right now in the Northeast of Alberta. We are negotiating and are near the end of drafting an accord between metro Edmonton and the Northeast Alberta Economic alliance, HUB, which will be a first, possibly in Canada, for a fairly remote rural area to enter into a rural/metro accord. It centres around our participation, as rural leaders, on Edmonton's cluster strategy teams; and sharing municipal services that the substantial civil service in Edmonton has to offer, and which we cannot afford on our own. We will also share our culture and our arts, both from the City of Edmonton, which has a very vibrant theatre and arts community, and our Northeast, which has a very vibrant heritage arts community.
The second measure would be to reduce transactions costs for people that are changing jobs, particularly moving between the formal and informal economies. Pensions, employment insurance and health benefits continue to be sticky points for job changes. Federal programs and policy have helped over the years, but we have some particularly difficult transactions costs for immigrants, Aboriginal people and the rural poor. Often, there is an intersection of these three groups as they move into the formal economy.
People in the rural blue-collar work force in general must place family and health in jeopardy when changing jobs because of the waiting periods for benefits to kick in. We should note that many of our rural jobs do not have benefits associated with them. That means no supplementary health and dental and so on. I think this is an important measure to work on.
We have to strengthen the performance of the informal economy. We have to help whole households transition in and out of it. One thing that is very important for us to appreciate is that our rural households are ``pluri-active,'' which means the household members engage in a vast array of day-by-day economic activities to keep themselves going. That includes all farm households in Canada, whatever their level of performance in the commercial commodity market.
The fourth measure is to weaken the low-level equilibrium trap. This is something that I have done work on since 1991. In 1990, I was a visiting scientist with the Institut national de recherche agronomique in France and started to learn something about systems theory and how it could apply to rural issues. Since 1991, I have had a strong research team of mathematicians, people in physics and economics at the University of Alberta, and with my former institute in France, we worked on this concept of a low-level equilibrium trap.
Basically, the nature of the economy traps people and businesses at a low level. We have tried to find ways to weaken that trap. The concept is very good from a learning perspective, if we think about rural poverty in terms of people that are in a low-level trap.
The fifth measure is to assist rural artisan small- and medium-sized enterprises and community enterprises proactively, and to help with the move of these enterprises to higher performance and safety standards. The point I am making here is that Canadian rural businesses, small businesses, have a real struggle to scale up production and employment.
This conclusion came out of our work in the foundation with small- and medium-sized enterprises. My work compared rural Canadian small and medium enterprises with rural Japanese small- and medium-sized enterprises. There was a marked difference; the Japanese enterprises were able to grow, create more jobs, expand into new markets and were larger than the rural Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises, which were locked into a mom-and-pop framework and had all kinds of problems with equity and markets and productivity.
We have some evidence to back this measure — all the measures, but particularly this measure — that if we work with these enterprises, we can move them up to higher levels of performance and meet higher standards.
I would also point out a little detail that rural people often get caught up in. When the women from our local community hall bring sandwiches to firefighters in a disaster situation, the sandwiches are turned away because they are not made under public health regulations. Our firefighters went without a meal because of that rule. This is approaching silliness.
Senator Mercer: It is not approaching, it has arrived.
Mr. Apedaile: The sixth measure is a twinning measure. We are having a problem with performance in our rural schools in Alberta. Our rural schools, with a few exceptions, tend to rank very low. Our schools in Smoky Lake rank down around the 500 or 700 level in the ranking of just under 800 schools. We are doing everything we can with our school board, but I think that rural/metro school twinning might be helpful.
We have talked about rural-to-rural school twinning, but we probably need it for rural-to-metro and school boards. This is not about transferring resources; this is about sharing all the good things — sports, libraries, labs and, of course, the distance learning — sharing the classroom experience to help especially our males stay in school.
The seventh measure is that better connectedness is needed between and among justice, mental and social health policies. We have to be more sensitive to the downloading issues that have to do with these three issues. Our RCMP detachment is dealing a greet deal of the time with mental issues. These mental health issues are the loose cannons in our community. The province has downloaded a lot of the mental health issues into the municipal level, where we do not have the resources to deal with them and they show up in all kinds of things like fence-cutting and firearms offences, things that a local councillor like me has to deal with. I am not equipped to deal with this, and neither is our rural Crime Watch organization equipped to deal with it.
Measure eight is to determine the public good value produced by farming — this is a long-standing point — and compensate farmers for delivering it. In a presentation before this committee in 2001, I made a long and detailed argument about the distinction between farming and commercial agriculture. As long as we continue to apply competitiveness policies for commercial, industrialized agriculture to farming, then we will have a lot of collateral damage. Farmers are needed in this country, and they are needed for all kinds of reasons. Most of those reasons do not translate through market demand and supply forces. Therefore, the pricing of the services that they produce is not discovered and we think that they are probably not important.
Measure nine is to accelerate the inclusion of agriculture and agriculture processing under the umbrella of labour and environmental legislation. This is a brief and controversial point because we have used exemptions from environmental and labour legislation as part of our competitiveness strategy. Certainly the agriculture and agricultural processing, agri-food lobby would argue for continuing exemption because their margins are all very tight. Competitiveness of an industry is not sustainable when it is based on exemptions from national standards for the treatment of labour or the environment. I would add that I think that these policy exemptions are not ethical either, in the larger context of our society.
The last point is that we need to add more aggressive provisions to our sustainability measures in the new deal program. As a municipal councillor, I am on the receiving end of the new deal grants, and thank goodness someone thought to put community sustainability into the eligibility criteria for our participation. We are using this grant for the first time in our history to do long-term strategic planning and build business plans for our communities. That will be an important contribution to our future; however, we need to do more. We need to use these grants to build the capacity for rural self-governance. There is too much of a dependency syndrome in our municipal councils and in our rural governing institutions.
I close with another thank you for your invitation and I just make the point that rural poverty is not about ideology, it is about ethics, it is about national security, it is about the productivity of all our rural assets in our nation and it is fundamentally about wellness, which I think in Canada is one of our most important goals shared by all Canadians.
The Chairman: This is certainly a different presentation than we have had before, and one full of a great deal of thought. I wanted you to note that Senator Grant Mitchell is here and he is from Edmonton. Mr. Apedaile is from Smoky Lake. at the moment.
Bill Reimer, Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, As an individual: I, too, would like to thank the committee very much for the invitation. I have been very pleased when I have been looking at the materials and discussions relating to the committee so far. Rather than stick to a relatively narrow approach to poverty, agriculture and forestry, the committee has chosen to treat its mandate in more comprehensive terms, thereby recognizing the many ways in which poverty challenges are complex and interrelated to so many other economic, social and political factors. Without this recognition, any policy or program proposal arising from these deliberations is bound to be limited in many ways.
I have had the advantage of previous discussions with Dr. Apedaile regarding his submission to the committee. Since it fits so closely to my own perspective, it frees me to focus on several features of rural society that may provide useful opportunities for policy responses.
Rural poverty is related to many other conditions and processes. Agricultural and more generally trade policy, for example, are intimately linked to the fate of rural communities, as clearly represented by Dr. Bollman's presentation to this committee a few weeks ago. This graph reflects such a point, by showing the relationship between integration into the global economy and population change for small sites. As the exposure to the global economy increases, rural communities typically suffer decreases in their population.
This is little surprise. In fact, Dr. Stabler documented it before this committee in 1994. At that time, however, he also cautioned us about the negative side of this trend, emphasizing that the human and social costs of those who are marginalized by that process will be substantial without concerted supports. It is to these supports that I wish to turn for within them we may find some policy options that can mitigate the negative impacts of low income.
As the OECD has recognized, low incomes are problematic because they limit people's access to essential goods and services, affordable housing, good health, well-being and participation in the social networks that provide support and identity. Low income may not be so problematic in a society that provides these services independently from income status. This is the promise of our formal health, education, welfare and justice systems. It is also the promise of more informal supports: family, friends, neighbours, churches and charities that step in when people are suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
In rural areas, however, the very processes that diminish the population base also decrease the number and proximity of these services, both formal and informal. Our research has demonstrated how education, health, welfare and commercial services have moved to regional centres from the small towns in rural Canada. This means that those who do not have easy access to transportation, or the social networks that can support transportation, are marginalized from these services. Transportation services therefore become an important focus for policy responses. Creating more options for private, public and informal services in rural places is bound to benefit the key groups suffering marginalization through lack of access to transportation — young people, the elderly and women.
Tax benefits, grants, fuel rebates, experiments with transportation pooling and new deal allocations for innovations, could all be used to these ends. Such an approach would represent a made-for-rural equivalent to the green requirements for urban transport.
Social support for vulnerable populations is not only a matter for formal services, however. Our research has documented the many ways in which people turn to a variety of informal networks when faced with challenges in their lives, from employment and housing to health and child care.
This chart identifies the types of support used by single mothers in our rural field sites. We see that single-mother households make more use of all four types of support than other households, including the more informal types found in what we call associative and communal types of relations. Policies and programs designed to support these types of populations would be well-advised to consider how they might in turn support the more informal social groups that provide such services to vulnerable people.
An important part of such initiatives must include the recognition that the legitimate concerns for fairness and accountability often serve to overburden such informal groups. Instead of simply adding it to the list of demands on these groups, therefore, mechanisms to bear the extra costs should be taken on as the responsibility of the funders.
The informal economy is also an important part of the rural safety net. As this graph shows, participation in the informal economy is a significant feature of both rural and urban economies, with rural areas surpassing urban, particularly in the low-income ranges. Rather than treat the informal economy as a pariah, we should consider it an important aspect of the safety net for low-income people and a contributor to the formal economy at the same time. The informal economy also serves as a training ground for the formal economy, a testing and a confidence-building mechanism for both potential employers and employees, and a cushion for the expansion and contraction of the formal economic activities.
A closer look at this data reveals some important qualifications. Considering self-employment as an important bridge to the formal economy, especially for women, we see that rural women experience such a transition considerably different than their urban sisters. For urban women, moving from unemployment to self-employment includes a reduction in the time they spend on informal economic activities. For rural women, on the other hand, self- employment means double duty since their time spent in informal economic activities is not diminished unless they move into paid work. The implications of these conditions are typically not included in the policies or programs directed to entrepreneurship, but they should not be overlooked if these programs are going to be effective. Program training, supports, conditions and expectations must be adapted to accommodate these realities if they are to be successful in rural areas.
In conclusion, my message is threefold. First, I support the committee's efforts to explore and embrace an intersectoral approach to understanding and addressing the issue of rural poverty. Second, I assume we need poverty reduction strategies of at least two types: those that focus on modifying the drivers of poverty and challenging the policies and programs contributing to it; and second, those that build the supports for people who are most vulnerable to its negative effects. My comments focused primarily on the latter aspect.
Finally, I have tried to make visible the important contribution of the informal supports and informal economy to the process of poverty reduction, or at least to the mitigation of its social and personal effects. This means considering programs and policies that serve to strengthen these informal mechanisms, build the social networks and groups that provide the services and remove the obstacles to their effectiveness.
Senator Mercer: First, I thank the presenters from being here and I appreciate the different types of presentations. Your presentations gave some solutions that thank God we are finally getting to that stage.
Mr. Apedaile, I wonder if you might expand on your fourth point of proactively assisting rural artisans and community, social-economy enterprises with their move to higher output and safety standards. I am not sure I understood the point you were trying to make.
Mr. Apedaile: The point is that much of the rural economy tends to be organized as artisan enterprises. Farming started as an artisan enterprise. Agriculture is an industrial and digital technology enterprise.
We have a grain farmer in our area who seeds 43,000 acres and he does it only because he has digital technology with geographic information systems, GIS, and GPS to do it. A colleague of mine tried it in Manitoba for a number of years in the late 1960s and he had many problems. He got up to 30,000 acres but could not figure out where his equipment was and which fields were his; he was swathing other people's grain and so on. Eventually he had to have a rather major sale. Those are the exceptions.
Most of our enterprises, including mainstream enterprises, are mom-and-pop artisan enterprises that centre on a particular skill or craft that people have. These enterprises have a hard time moving forward and scaling up. That means differentiating their products, finding new markets or growing their business.
That is a very important issue to deal with, because the Western Diversification program in our area has many entrepreneurship programs to start small businesses. I am on the board of directors of RCFDC, Community Futures Development Corporation, where we put our money into trying to start new businesses, but effectively these loans almost always end up being consumer loans to the mom-and-pop owners of the business. It just does not move from there, it does not create employment and it does not do the kinds of things we need to get people moving out of their low incomes.
On the second part, part of the issue is standards. We assume performance standards in our rural community and rural economy, and that has to do with health standards. When someone sets up a small slaughter business for hunters, for making sausage from deer, we do not understand why we should have health standards in those operations. We still handle it with our marketing board legislation. I was on the agriculture products marketing council and one of the chronic issues before us was the exemption level for egg producers. Could a person with a thousand layers in a floor operation be exempt from the marketing board rules and move their eggs any way they wanted into a market?
We have to improve our quality standards. We have to start thinking ISO 9001 for quality; we have to think of ISO 14000 series for environmental integrity behind our businesses. Rural artisan enterprises, however, have a difficult time dealing with that. I think, as a matter of policy and learning and promotion, that it would be helpful to understand that these are some of the issues that are impeding the entrepreneurship from moving into our rural places and employing more people.
Senator Mercer: My second question goes to your eighth point, where you say: Determine the public good value produced by farming and compensate farmers for delivering it. Does this mean raising the prices of food to Canadian consumers or are you suggesting that we increase government subsidies to farmers or get into subsidies to ensure the proper compensation? I should preface by saying that I like the idea, I just do not know how to do it. I do not know how to blend the political fallout of raising food prices in the towns and cities and properly compensate farmers in rural areas.
Mr. Apedaile: This concept is something that our foundation has worked on for quite a long time, and initially we called it a social contract but that is not really what it is. Our rural-metro accord that we are working on in the Northeast with Metro Edmonton is a thin edge of the wedge. It is a concept based on the idea that it is the metro people in Canada — we are a very Metropolitan urbanized country — who determine the value of what we do in rural Canada. When we start to build our linkages between rural and the metro hub, we start creating that awareness and developing closer connections between the suppliers of public goods and services. I am referring to services like a clean environment, clean water and a watershed that is healthy and delivers abundant and clean water. When we start building that connection that establishes the value for those things.
Presently, in the North Saskatchewan River watershed, we are doing an integrated watershed management plan. I am on the steering committee for this plan. I represent the 26 rural municipalities in the watershed, not the small urban areas in the counties and municipal districts. In our strategic planning in Smoky Lake County, we have asked our consultants to organize their work around the watershed and subwatersheds in the county. I know for people from Ontario this is kind of old stuff, but for us it is fairly new stuff. The main advantage is the value of a watershed that is kept intact delivers value-added and assures safe and high-quality potable water. We have a lot of safe potable water in rural Alberta but it is not all that high quality all the time. These items are valued and they have to be paid for.
The issues surrounding how to finance something like that are just coming to our table. If I change my business practices as a grain grower and it means that I have to defer income or reduce the intensity of my operation, which means I cannot survive on the narrower margins, then I need some type of compensation.
Senator Mercer, I do not think it is about subsidies. I think it is about price discovery or, as we have put forward for the sake of discussion, possibly a supermarket tax to balance the GST; there are many GST food exemptions in our supermarkets. Food is GST exempt, mostly, so a 1 per cent to 2 per cent supermarket tax on food would more than finance a serious rural-metro concerted effort to compensate and properly reward the farm families and the rural families that, in fact, are delivering many of the benefits to the metro areas.
Mr. Reimer: May I add another example? An interesting example is found in the accord between New York City and the Catskill Mountain region, where they have recognized the importance of the Catskills for their water and for maintaining that water in reasonably good shape, and how it is intimately related to issues of community development. They have actually worked out a long-standing deal along those same lines.
Senator Mercer: Thank you very much. That is an interesting aspect we should perhaps have a closer look at.
My question for Professor Reimer is you mentioned the importance of transportation in rural communities. This is a struggle that governments have when trying to provide services to Canadians and our answer to everything is to provide the same service to everyone, but what works in downtown Halifax or Toronto or Edmonton will not work in the community I live in, a place called Mount Uniacke in Nova Scotia. We do not have public transit, but then when governments come in and honestly try to do it, we provide a tax credit for public transit expenditures.
Do you have a suggestion to solve some of the public transit issues, which pertain to single women in rural Canada? Do you have any suggestions?
Mr. Reimer: One of the ways that I would at least consider, and I think this is an area in which we have to explore various options, is to approach it by looking at how people manage at present. It is often done in a very informal way. It is family or friends you call upon if you have to go to the hospital and so on. One direction is to understand how this informal system operates, and then think about ways in which we might help support the system, either through some kind of transportation credit, some rebates, working through informal groups or even formal transportation pooling type of operations. I would explore those types of possibilities. We know that there are a number of experiments that are going on within rural areas to try and cover these problems. Sometimes they are championed by local churches; sometimes they are organized by other kinds of groups within these communities.
Senator Oliver: Thank you both for two interesting presentations. One of the things that I noticed that you both talked about is the need to build relationships between urban and rural areas as a way of overcoming issues of rural poverty. Mr. Reimer, you talked about the intersectoral approach that this committee is taking as one of them, and you talked about promoting rural-metro alliances around common interests. You indicated you had been reading the transcripts and you know who has appeared before us, but one person we had before us was a man by the name of Mark Partridge. Mr. Partridge argued that rural communities need to think about forming regional blocks that encompass urban areas so that they can take advantage of the growth happening in urban areas, so it can spill over into rural areas as a way of helping bring them up and helping to overcome some of this poverty.
What do you think of his proposal? Does it imply in some sense the abandoning of the more remote rural areas that are distant from urban areas, and if so do you agree with that?
Finally, what else do you think can be done to help these very, very remote rural communities that are not that proximate to the urban areas? It seems to me the further you go out the more difficult it is to integrate them in the things that you two would like to see, so that the urban can help pull up the rural areas.
Mr. Apedaile: When we are talking about the rural-metro alliance, we are not talking about the urban area pulling up the rural area. We are saying that the rural economy is been pulling up the metro area for years. Our common interests lie in making this symbiotic relationship work into the future. In my paper, I discuss the issue of the meaning of sustainability. It is about the connectedness between a thriving economy and ecology or environment of which we maintain the integrity and the justice issues. It is the connectedness that we are missing when we find ourselves in unsustainable situations.
Now the rural economy, following this line of reasoning, Senator Oliver, has sustainability problems because the connectedness is not being realized as long as metro is not part of the equation and as long as we think cities are somehow unconnected or different from rural in the sense that their economies do not work together and their environments are intimately connected. Our entire downstream watershed in the North Saskatchewan River is affected by metro Edmonton. If we did not balance water levels metro Edmonton's water intake would sometimes in winter be above the flow of the North Saskatchewan River. Metro Edmonton is totally related for its well-being of its water on the upstream rural community. That is one of many examples.
No; in a sense, as much as I respect Mark Partridge's work and thinking, that is too passive a concept. It is really about participation in the strategies that metropolitan areas are using to be globally competitive. Edmonton is competing globally. That is where the focus is in Edmonton, and the rural economy that is linked to Edmonton is part of Edmonton's competitiveness. Edmonton is the gateway to our global access because our future in Smoky Lake County is also.
I recently returned from negotiating a memorandum of intent with the Municipality of Chongqing and Smoky Lake County to do a pre-feasibility study on beef processing for OTM animals, over 30 month animals. I can tell you that most of our farmers in Smoky Lake County are cow/calf operators and cow/calf operations are part of the income strategy of some low-income situations.
The solutions are totally different today from what they were before. I really need to truncate this because I am passionate about this, Madam Chairman, and you have many other things to do.
The Chairman: I am passionate about it myself, but carry on.
Mr. Reimer: I would like to add one comment. One of the things we have been doing is exploring what might be some of the avenues or the bases on which such alliances might be developed. We have talked a lot of about water and that is clearly quite visible.
Our orientation was, what are the kinds of things that urban people already know are important, so that we do not have to identify the things that rural is providing and try to convince urban people that it is important? There are a number of things they already know and those are key elements from a strategic point of view.
One is water, and we have discussed that. Another is food — they are clearly concerned about food — and the third is environment. They touch issues that are already of interest to urban people, and it is around those areas that we can start exploring these alliances.
It also gives us a basis for thinking about those more remote communities. Proximity helps — for example, with the watershed issue and Edmonton, but there is also the recognition of the importance of Mackenzie or Tumbler Ridge to the economy of British Columbia or to the economy of Vancouver, which needs to be explored as possible ways in which those alliances can be developed.
The Chairman: Mr. Apedaile, you might be pleased to know that down in our southwest corner of Alberta where we have been hammered by BSE, the mad cow issue, we have very critical water issues as we see our glaciers disappearing. Our grains and oilseeds are always struggling. It was almost because of the shock of BSE that the City of Lethbridge — and we have a very activist mayor — decided to bring in all of the wonderful little towns in our rural area surrounding that city and have an informal council of the region. When you put the region together, it may consist of a lot of small towns and a small city, but add them all up and it is 250,000 people if you go up into Crowsnest Pass. This has become a continuing effort. It has shown a great deal of collegiality and, I think, improvement of connecting links that help in the very issue we are talking about today. It is very close to what you are saying and might be of interest to you.
Senator Gustafson: I have so many questions that I do not know where to start. Mr. Apedaile, you make reference to the global economy. If you read my speech of Tuesday, I covered that in the house.
The Chairman: It was a very good speech.
Senator Gustafson: It seems we have not become aware, both the powers that be and the Canadian public, that agriculture has not moved into the global economy. We are a very forward moving country, but we seem to have left out a large sector of the economy. There seem to be one standard for urban Canada and another for rural Canada.
I will explain it this way. We have a very active oil field in the Estevan-Weyburn area, but there are two economies. There is the agricultural economy, which really suffers, because of the buoyancy of the oil economy. Who will work for the farmer when he will not get all the services and things that go along with the wages in the oil fields? In our area, if they are doing seismic work, all the trucks head for Calgary on Friday night; they do not stay in Estevan or Weyburn. We have a very transient economy that moves toward urban Canada. If you add to that the political strength, you have some real problems in rural Canada.
It may not be as predominant in Alberta as it is in Saskatchewan, but rural Saskatchewan is losing its young people to what I call the Alberta oil economy. We have older farmers saying to their sons, I would not let you farm if you wanted to. This is not a bright picture but it is the way it is.
If I go through Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan, and I stop in for breakfast there, I can get a very cheap breakfast for a couple of dollars. You do not want to try that in Ottawa. The question I have always had is why are there two standards?
If the federal Department of Agriculture puts out a program and we hire an additional few hundred people in Winnipeg to administer it, we expect to pay someone that does not really have much education relative to what they are doing something like $30,000 or $35,000 a year. Yet, the graph shows that the farm population had the lowest of all incomes — it was somewhere around $25,000. These are people that are working hard, probably 12 hours a day or more. I want to hear your comments on how we handle this situation.
Mr. Apedaile: Last weekend in Calgary, I am sure your green team helped with the morale of the folks that are experiencing all the things you have described. You may be talking about such rules as whether mascots are allowed in the stadium as well.
The Chairman: We apologize.
Senator Gustafson: We got even on that one.
Mr. Apedaile: You have expressed very eloquently the concerns we hear every day in our rural communities. They are concerns that have a note of desperation in them.
I came here today to offer just 10 measures from among many other measures that I thought might help address the issues that you have described so eloquently. The issues I tried to outline with respect to the distinction between commodity agriculture and farming apply to your question. The fact is that our agriculture, probably to a large extent, is losing competitiveness on a steady basis with agricultural economies in countries like China. Do many Canadians realize that China, for quite some time, has been a net exporter of food, I wonder?
In Brazil, when the transportation problems we hear of are resolved, the product will move out of Brazil much more quickly into global markets. The Eastern European area is still an institutional fiasco in terms of the organization of the grains industry.
I noticed that one of our pundits was talking about having us exhausted the green revolution — I think it was Gwynne Dyer. We still have a lot of technology in our hip pockets globally.
The worldwide research community is now very productive in terms of new ways to get food to people. I believe that, from my own experience and my reading and so on, agriculture is probably going to be less and less important in producing food for people, that nutrition will become more of the focus as opposed to safety. We are used to safety issues dominating our agenda here in Canada. We produce great food and it is very safe; however, we are facing substitutes.
We do need to start rethinking just where we are going with our agriculture and possibly even our fibre industries, certainly our fishing industries, which used to be the solid foundation. Part of the reason that incomes are not buoyant and we are not participating in the metro advantage, or the Alberta advantage certainly in rural Alberta, is that the function, the very raison d'etre for rural enterprise and rural settlement is changing so fundamentally, and fast as well. Our assets in rural Canada are so immobile, and by immobile I mean tied to place, they attract uncertainty. Any fixed asset attracts uncertainty and becomes a residual claimant for income. If we are thinking globally, our rural assets being fixed in place is a residual claimant on global income in the distribution as opposed to the resource allocation side.
These are the issues, I think, Senator Gustafson, that underlie the description that you have laid out before us, and it is a description that is on the tongues of so many of my neighbours, and our rural neighbours across this country. We must start thinking much more strategically and understand the changing function of our rural economies.
Senator Gustafson: I have one comment. I live, as the crow flies, 20 miles from the U.S. border. The U.S. farm economy has had the three best years in its history. We have had the three worst years in our history. We are saying we cannot meet the level playing field of the Americans because of their subsidies. That is what we say. It is my contention that we cannot afford not to in terms of the global economy, both the European and, as you say, China and around the world. Canada really has not looked at that. We have said we are going to the World Trade Organization and we will straighten this all out. Well, you know how it happens at the World Trade Organization, or has happened. At the same time the subsidies in the United States have been $70 billion. They have about 300 million people. We have 30 million. If we put $7 billion, in comparison to the population, into subsidies and realize that we must get into this economy, that money would come back into the system. Our rural economy is just dying because of low commodity prices and the fact that we cannot compete. There is no way we can compete.
The American people will fight for the heartland, whether they come from California or New York. It may be partly because of the way the Senate is set up down there. Every state gets a say, and they will defend the heartland. We do not have that kind of vigour in Canada for agriculture and rural development.
Mr. Apedaile: I have talked about the structure of Cabinet Table stakeholder style policy-making. We need to look seriously at restructuring Cabinet Tables at the provincial-federal level because they are structured in an old mercantile model. Probably there needs to be some rethinking on that model.
The U.S. farm policy, the European farm policy and the Japanese farm policy or agriculture policy buys food security. There are two ways to get food security. One is to buy it and the other is to grow it. The U.S., in its current geopolitical status, cannot afford to rely on importing food. We talked about the sugar lobby briefly. Sugar has always been seen as a strategic commodity in the United States for the national security reason. That is one of the reasons I put at the end of my presentation that rural poverty is a national security issue; it undermines the integrity of our society.
In the United States it is not subsidies; this is a mistake. The payments to agricultural producers in the United States by and large go to the large, commercial, industrial, corporate, however they are structured, producers, because national security is the issue. In Japan national security is the issue, in Europe geopolitical positioning and security is the issue. We in Canada do not have that concern as all. That is why we find it hard to figure out how to ensure that our farm community and agricultural industry, including our processing, remains viable.
Senator Gustafson: If you put dollars back into the rural, agricultural economy, that money will circulate and come back into the economy of Canada. Don Mazankowski used to say if you put $1 into agriculture it will circulate 24 times.
Saskatoon is a good example. How many air seeders have they built around there that they have exported into the United States? That has created jobs and wealth for Canada. We do not seem to look at it from that aspect.
Mr. Apedaile: The rural multipliers for incoming dollars are very low. I measured those multipliers once upon a time in the Edson area in Alberta area at the time when ARDA was trying to deal with the issues that this committee is dealing with, and that dollar only has a multiplier of about 1.4 locally, if that. It bounces out of the community, so the next bounce is into the provincial economy, and then to the heartland and globally.
With more open global trade that dollar really migrates very quickly even out of our national economy. That is why I am emphasizing and underlining — and Mr. Reimer is too — this global connectedness, because those arguments are not really very sound anymore. We have such weak multipliers.
With reference to your earlier point with the oil dollar, we are in Canada now suffering the ``Dutch disease,'' which is the name given to the problem that the Dutch economy faced with North Sea oil. In that situation prices became inflated, labour was tight and Dutch manufacturing had a dreadful time, just like Ontario and Quebec manufacturing is having now, as well as farmers. Our farmers are experiencing the fallout of Dutch disease with the oil industry in the Prairies.
Senator Peterson: Mr. Apedaile, I was interested in your discussion on metro structure in northeast Alberta.
In Saskatchewan, we have 343 rural municipalities, villages, towns, cities and none of them with any power, to speak of. I was wondering if you have done any modeling as to what would be an optimum size of an area where you could have some economic and political clout, and be able to provide the resources like economic development, planners and that sort of thing, and maybe even go as far as discussing sharing of taxation powers. The way it is now, you talked about downloading, is that it just happens right from the top, and at the bottom end they cannot compete. There is nothing left to provide the services. I am interested in your comments.
Mr. Apedaile: You take what you have. We have, in Alberta, two main metropolitan centres, and a number of other growing ones. The two are joining in the corridor with the rapid growth in the Red Deer area. That corridor is sneaking down towards Lethbridge and up towards Grande Prairie.
There is no such thing as an ``optimum,'' but what I do think is that there is an emerging understanding of how to organize the relationship. Therefore, you have to have venues like this where that relationship can discover itself and develop.
Our Northeast Alberta HUB Economic Alliance is sort of a child of Alberta economic development. The board is really made up of municipal political leaders, for example, from Cold Lake, Lloydminster and all the municipalities in between.
One of the big advantages of this Northeast Economic Alliance is its educational effect on us. It broadens our minds because we tend to get local and preoccupied with gravel. It is not about optimum, but if you want to talk about optimum, perhaps it is optimum learning, optimal learning models, a way to learn how to connect our communities. We can do that with a framework. The Edmonton City Council, including the mayor, came out to Vermilion, in an amazing demonstration of empathy and seriousness. Our MLA, Ray Danyluk, always says, do not talk to me, and do not look for your rural MLAs; look for the urban MLAs; you need to get to know these urban MLAs. It applies to urban MPs as well. It is about learning and if you are thinking optimum, it is about concepts like that, Senator Peterson.
Senator Mitchell: I am interested in the question of alternative fuels, what those might do for markets and specifically whether you agree that they would help. In addition, what measures can be taken to ensure that farmers, if these are undertaken, participate in the production of these fuels beyond just growing the feedstock.
Mr. Apedaile: From my own analytic perspective, I have always been a little wary of these biofuels because they are also just a different commodity. We are not doing much in terms of value-added. One of the reasons for an increasing profile for biofuels today is the national security issue in the United States. The U.S. realizes it is vulnerable on the energy side. It is not vulnerable on the agricultural production side but on the energy side.
Senator Oliver: They have Canada.
Mr. Apedaile: They have Canada but they also have their friend Hugo. They have a hard time dealing with people like the new leaders emerging in South America. They even have difficulty dealing with leaders with different perspectives in Canada for example.
There is a big move to biofuels, and from the agricultural perspective, they see it as an opportunity. It is a bit opportunistic because we are trying to translate the higher energy prices into feed grain prices. We forget about all the value-added programs we are trying to develop in Canada on the feed grain side.
My understanding, from talking to people at Highland Feeders, just southeast of where we live, is that the biofuel industry in the United States already has a 3-cent to 5-cent effect per bushel on barley prices; it is translating into a 3- cent to 5-cent effect. For him, that is not really a problem because he will hedge that and work it through the market. Overall it is problematic for our livestock industry in Canada, and all the other industries that are derivatives of grain, when the price of grain starts being attached to the price of oil. It is also vulnerable because we have a huge number of energy substitutes sitting in a box somewhere just waiting to move into production. Not just energy substitutes but combustion substitutes. Every time we have a spike in energy, like we have just had, that unleashes a new bunch of ``gremlins'' out of that box that will substitute for conventional oil. Biofuels will tie us to conventional and unconventional oil.
It is necessary for the United States because of national security. It is necessary for Brazil because Brazil does not have oil so it has always been moving in that direction. I do not think it is a salvation for low incomes; it is not going to contribute to resolving low income issues in rural Canada, in my view.
Senator Mitchell: Do you feel that the work of the Canadian Wheat Board sustains rural income or would it be damaged if its structure was changed? You will have competition. I do not mean that to be a loaded question, I guess it is to some extent, but I would appreciate your input. I am trying to be less partisan. You mentioned barley.
Mr. Apedaile: Madam Chairman, are witnesses allowed to say no comment?
The Chairman: Yes, they are.
Mr. Apedaile: As a grain grower, I support the Canadian Wheat Board as single desk seller. It is not because I do not have my frustrations with the Wheat Board, but because globally you need every bit of market clout you can get. There are only seven real handling companies with proprietary technologies in terms of working together through alliances and shared services. Bracketing, as I have outlined in my written presentation, is a serious problem.
The other day I was offered, and I accepted, a contract from Pioneer Grain. For $40, I can buy a canola package that includes the technology, use agreement, the roundup and the seed. As a sweetener, I get a $4 basis on June-July delivery of my 2006 crop. That is bracketing; that is where one company puts me in the middle as a grain grower.
It has already happened in the United States for poultry production. It is also going to be supplemented by a management contract for $7 an acre, because I have discussed that with my Cargill representative.
Senator Oliver: An additional $7?
Mr. Apedaile: Yes, it is not in this deal; it is another possibility. The point I am making is that the Canadian Wheat Board, as a single-desk seller, retains a little bit of power in an otherwise very concentrated global grains handling, marketing and trading organization. That is why I support it.
Mr. Reimer: I am not a grain farmer, but I would come to a similar conclusion. I have nothing to add in terms of the nature of the argument.
Senator Mitchell: Your voice is a great addition. I have one other question, which is on the sociological side. Education is critically linked to getting out of poverty. There are many issues that arise in that respect. One issue is rural access to post-secondary education. Do you have some opinions on distance learning, its effectiveness, or other ways we could establish rural access to post-secondary education and overcome the cost?
In addition, I would like to hear your opinions on early childhood education and how to deliver it to rural Canada.
Mr. Reimer: One of the things that we have been looking at very carefully is the role of community colleges and schools. In general, those institutions are tremendously underused within all communities, but it becomes particularly important within rural areas. Some of the issues are insurance issues, some of them are cost issues and some are the past pattern of use. There are tremendous amounts of simply physical and knowledge-based resources there that are opportunities that need to be explored.
We do see some interesting experiments in which the physical buildings are made available at other points in time, for example — where they have been exploring with distance education, identifying what works and what does not, what are the target audiences that are most likely to respond. That is an area where we need exploration, but we also need some thought regarding the regulations that would free up these resources in local and more distant communities. The resources include schools, and community colleges.
It touches on early childhood education, as that aspect of education can become part of the process. It touches on the question of transportation that I have mentioned, in terms of getting day care or education options. I do not have any solutions on the matter, but I think the exploration of ways in which that may be handled is the way to go. I believe that it should be approached informally because the early childhood education and care issue is very personal. I think we should look at the ways in which it is handled now, the ways in which people are managing now, and build on that informal structure. That is the way I would probably go if I was starting to look at the options — to make it easier for people to help one another at the informal level. I agree those are both extremely important issues.
The Chairman: Senator Gustafson wanted to hop in with a supplementary on the Wheat Board issue.
Senator Mercer: It will not be political at all.
Senator Gustafson: I would almost say that the canola crop has saved our farmers from the Wheat Board. If canola was under the Canadian Wheat Board, you would not get your $40 package from Pioneer; they could not give it to you. In the southern part of Saskatchewan and Alberta, you have Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, all the big world players. They have all built new terminals along the U.S. border. Right now, they get the best benefit out of the CWB, without a doubt.
You take a semi-truckload of wheat for No. 1, 12 protein and you get $1.90 initially. For No. 3, you get $1.30. What are you going to do with that in today's economy? My neighbours right across the line are getting between $5 and $6 and we cannot compete with that.
My own view on the CWB is that 80 per cent of the farmers would stick with the Wheat Board — at least at the outset. However, there must be some change in the situation. Our canola goes to Velva, North Dakota, where they are building a mammoth plant that will be in production within a year or so. That would not have happened, and many of our farms would have gone down, if it were not for canola and an open market. I apologize for making the other side of the argument, but it must be made. In fact, about four years ago we were called to Winnipeg by the United Grain Growers, who suggested that the Saskatchewan Wheat Board, Alberta Wheat Board, United Grain Growers and Manitoba Wheat Board form one big company and compete with these other players. It would have been a grand idea, but it never happened. It would have worked, and most of the farmers would have been happy to sell through a Canadian-owned, world company that could compete with the big companies. That is where the CWB sells its grain and the largest amounts go through Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill. I rest my case.
Senator Mahovlich: It is quite ironic that we are getting this Dutch oil disease, because 50 years ago we got Dutch elm disease. Boy, it was a catastrophe.
Mr. Apedaile, you were mentioning you were in France in the 1990s. I just returned from Europe and their farms are very attractive. I was in Italy where the farmers work very hard. I was at a two-star hotel in a certain area, and at 2 a.m. there was so much noise that I wondered what was going on. I looked out my window and they were setting up their tents for the market. Tents were being set up and these farmers were coming into the city, so I assume the rural areas are allowed to come in and sell their goods in the cities. This was Rome; of course, it is 2,000 years old and it is still going.
I was wondering, do they have the same rural problems that we have, or have they found the answers to their rural problems in France and other European countries?
Mr. Apedaile: In 1991, the first annual conference of the Rural Revitalization Foundation, at that time called Rural Restructuring Foundation, invited the director for planning from the national planning commission in France to address our conference in Camrose. She sat down and had a long talk with Shirley McLellan, which is why Ms. McLellan is so interested in rural development in Alberta, although I am sure that is not the only reason, because she is a highly motivated woman on her own.
To come back to metro, one of the points she made, was that the rings of poverty around their major cities is a real problem. She argued that the revitalization of rural France was part of the solution to the social and economic pressures in the metropolitan areas.
I did some work for the OECD on a strategy that the French have used in terms of branding or trademarking remote and hilly parts of France, and this was in the Normandy area. They have what they call a "natural park" and here we have a "national park". In a natural park, they manage a rural area. They designate the area somehow and then they brand it. The Government of France supervises the branding process and exercises the discipline for branding or trade marking solutions. That added substantial value to traditional rural outputs, and therefore to rural jobs, in what otherwise would be a very depressed area of rural France.
The French and the Europeans in general have embarked on many ingenious ways to add value from metropolitan marketplaces and bring it back into the rural areas. I looked at a similar tactic in Japan, where I have taught and done some research, in the Lake Kasumigaura area northeast of Tokyo. In that area, they used to produce a small fish like a smelt, which they would dry in the sun and sell in Tokyo. They caught this fish with nets drawn by boats with big white sails, and the wind would catch these boats and pull them sideways across the lake pulling the nets.
As industrial development grew around this lake, and the lake became polluted, it died. They decided they had to do something about this and they have revitalized the lake. It is now ecologically healthy and they have introduced what they call their ``white sail brand.'' Everything that is sold in the Tokyo area bears the brand name, and even the trains going from Tokyo station out to that area have white sails on the cars. The white sail brand fish in Tokyo sells for twice the price of the same fish produced anywhere else and that value goes into the cooperative. That is the way they organize the business for the white sail brand on fish, but the white sail brand applies to a whole bunch of rural products that they produce out there that are identified with the lake.
Of course, as you know, Japanese agriculture is very fertilizer intensive, so part of the recovery of the lake meant that farmers had to back off on their fertilizer applications. In doing that, they have a brand for everything they produce, the white sail brand, and they get far more from the market, everything from these fish to lotus roots.
There are strategies in place in other countries. Of course, they have bigger markets than we have here in Canada. We are thinking about in marketing OTM cows into China's largest city of Chongqing; 34 million people, just a little bit bigger than Canada. We are hoping to brand with the ecological integrity, which we hope to have with proper watershed management. We are going to combine that with adventure recreation because that is something that Chinese cannot get access to in China.
If we combine ranching and beef processing and adventure recreation we think perhaps we can brand it successfully. We are in the very early stages so expectations should not be created, but the point I am trying to make is that globally there are ingenious ways, Senator Mahovlich, to address these issues. People are addressing them, have addressed them before us, and are making money at it, and they are resolving the problem of low incomes in rural areas with these strategies.
It is part of the integrity. This connectedness — environment, justice and economy — if you break any of the connection in any way or fail to understand it in any way you will have a sustainability problem. Sustainability is just another word for poverty and low wellness of our communities.
Senator Mercer: One of the fundamental problems we seem to have in this country is that we do not take agriculture seriously. The Americans look at agriculture as a security issue. The Europeans look at it as a sustainability issue, that they want to be able to feed themselves, and we have it probably too good in this country and we do not understand that it could be a security issue for us and it could be a sustainability issue as well. We should be able to feed ourselves. Obviously our climate does not allow us to grow certain things that we have grown accustomed to, but I do not know how we as a committee and parliamentarians raise that level of consciousness. This is a serious business. If we do not address this issue, we are not going to own our agricultural industry, and we will be dependent on someone else dictating what we consume and at what price.
Am I wrong in my assessment? You both have much more experience in reviewing agricultural policy around the world.
Mr. Reimer: I think you are looking for what kind of an issue we can make it that people respond to. I think it is potentially both of those, and it is not recognized. The environmental has potential, but I would agree with you that we have not had our act together in terms of making a claim for our farming.
Senator Mercer: From a political point of view, because I am a practical person in terms of politics, I am trying to envisage a policy that it does not matter what part of the world it is but one that can put to the Canadian people, a largely urban people, the need for them to step up to the plate and sustain rural Canada, whether it be through agricultural subsidies, increased prices at the supermarket, or some other combination thereof. That is where I have this difficulty.
We come up with some great answers. However, if we as parliamentarians cannot sell it to the people — if we go to the people and say here is what we want to do and they say it is crazy, we will vote for the other people who are not in favour of that — that is the problem. It does not matter whether it is the Conservatives or the Liberals, we are all wrestling with the same problem, and trying to find a solution that will work for rural Canada but is marketable in urban Canada.
Mr. Reimer: As I mentioned, we have been exploring food, the environment and water as some of the levers that might make that work. At this point, I think we are in the very early stages of that exploration. We can point to examples where the urban people have responded and are concerned with it; but at this point I am not sure whether there is a clear answer to it, other than to identify possibilities and explore them.
Senator Mercer: If you get an answer, make sure you call us.
The Chairman: Mr. Reimer, would you like to finish your response to Senator Mitchell?
Mr. Reimer: I want to add a few comments regarding the question of distance education and distance learning. We looked at some of those issues and we were encouraged by the emerging opportunities for distance education. We were also discouraged with the limited access to broadband in some areas. This effective distance education requires broadband access; and for a number of reasons — some of the smaller areas are still on telephone and those options do not become available to them, so that they would have to move to regional centres. Once again, it is the regionalization aspect of it.
The other thing we found is that people will use the new technologies, but they often use them in conjunction with the traditional technologies — from telephones to bulletin boards to print media and so on. Part of it is to develop their confidence in the new technology. You know how if you are working with email even, you are loaded with spam. You have a whole set of additional things that you have to deal with, and much of it is enough to turn people off. It is a question of building their skill, but also their confidence in the use of the new media. What can I trust and what can I not trust? For that, they turn to the traditional forms like television, radio, their friends and magazines, for example.
These technologies are very useful, but the process by which they become integrated is not simply, here it is, use it. You have to see that there are supports for these other types of communication elements.
Senator Oliver: I was absolutely fascinated with the response that you gave, Mr. Apedaile, to a question from Senator Gustafson when you took a visionary look at agriculture. You said that one of the things that while we are looking at rural poverty; we ought to be looking at what other people in the area of agriculture and agricultural sciences are doing. We ought to be rethinking our traditional concept of the farm and farming. You said we have to look at what we have traditionally grown as farmers, and that today we are much more nutrition oriented. My impression is that today we can take a pill rather than eating the traditional foods that we have grown, such as the grapes and barleys and so on. Can you see the grain fields and the barley fields we have been producing for the last century being turned into big factories that are producing food substitutes?
Mr. Apedaile: I do not see the fields being turned into big factories; in a way, that is what they are now. We do not need much space to produce food substitutes.
One of the issues we think about on the Prairies is whether buffalo will roam again. Some of the production methods that we use now and the commodities we produce will move more and more into the luxury end of people's nutrition worldwide.
Senator Oliver: Please give us an example.
Mr. Apedaile: Well, certainly beef, for example. Beef is a very inefficient animal in transforming grains into human nutrition. Chicken is far better than a beef animal, but a chicken may not do as good a job with forage as a beef cow; I do not know.
The issue I heard over and over again in Chongqing a few weeks ago was that beef is a safe, nutritious and clean food because Chongqing, like many other Chinese concentrations of population, depends on pork as their primarily source of protein. Their pork is a scavenger industry; it is a recycling industry.
When I lived in Kathmandu, it bothered me to see that most of the pork being brought onto the market was being produced on the garbage heaps. Beef is seen as a clean food, but I do not think it will ever be a mass food — although some of the things with cow and bull meat processing, can get into the fast-food industry.
One of the big items on the supermarket shelves in Chongqing is beef wrapped as we would wrap caramel candies. That type of beef can be purchased in bulk, and the people there scoop it up by the hundred kilograms. The beef is packaged in brightly coloured wrapping, just like a candy wrapper. It is slightly sugared and spiced, although the sugar taste is very different from the sugar we have in North America. The way the product was differentiated — like different brands and obviously many different candies — was around the spices that were combined with the beef. That was a pick-up, fast food thing that people could take on the bus with them or home or give to the kids at school or whatever. That is another concept.
I think that the form in which we now enjoy food will change. What we will enjoy will be more of a luxury. If you compare some of the fast foods that we eat, they bear no resemblance to what we used to eat at Sunday dinner after church.
Senator Oliver: In terms of rural poverty, which we are studying, how will this visionary change in farming helping the rural poverty issue?
Mr. Apedaile: The people in rural areas will not be producing food. Most of our rural economy is now a service economy at 75 per cent. The people who produce food in our rural economy now are a tiny minority. I do not think there will be much difference to that dimension of rural poverty. Other issues will be more important in dealing with poverty. They are fundamental economic issues I have alluded to before, like mobility of assets and education. Thirty per cent of our males in our 20-to-35-year cohort in Smoky Lake County in the last census had finished high school. Of those that had finished, less than 10 per cent went on to anything else that you could call post-secondary education. For our women, 90 per cent had finished high school, and of that 90 per cent, more than 35 per cent had post- secondary schooling of some type.
We have a totally different thing happening. The roads that I am responsible for in my division are primarily for commuting. The roads contribute to the material level of living of the rural households. They are for commuting — and mainly by women in small cars because they cannot afford big cars. The road also has to handle B trains, which is the headache and why I get calls from women who are trying to commute.
Senator Mahovlich: I am from Ontario where everything is so convenient and where there are schools and large cities. Do Ontario and Quebec have rural poverty like the Western and Eastern provinces?
Mr. Reimer: If you make comparisons at the formal level, the levels are as high as they are elsewhere, but the form is different. The statistics do not necessarily represent some of those issues. For example, in Quebec, I have been involved with a study that is looking at rural suicides and related issues, mostly among young men. They are extremely high by comparison to the rest of the country, they are extremely high in rural areas, and they are very high in remote areas. That also is a reflection of community or a society in trouble and is quite worrying.
The analysis in terms of looking at why that might be the case is tied very much to the transformation of the economy from a primary industry type of economy to an economy that offers very little for young men. Along the lines that Mr. Apedaile has mentioned, it is combined with low education and not going further in terms of education. I think that the suicide levels are a reflection of that as well.
Some of the most interesting research compares different communities based on the kind of cultural supports that they provide. This comes from Aboriginal communities, for example, and from work in British Columbia by Chandler, where he has been looking at the extent to which communities provide cultural activities, traditional languages, and whether they have celebrations around the culture. You see a tremendous difference in the communities that have cultural and community supports, and those that do not. He has a lovely graph that illustrates the higher the number of supports, the lower the suicide rates. There is something in that that is a lesson about the importance of the community's identity and the self-understanding of the community and the institutions around it that become very important for supporting and nurturing our young people.
Senator Gustafson: If you were to do one thing to alleviate rural poverty, what would you do? This committee becomes — and, should I say that it is one of the best committees on the Hill — very frustrated because this is such a big subject and there are so many facets to it as we hear different witnesses from across the country. If you were to do one thing, what would you do?
Mr. Reimer: Can I do two things?
Senator Gustafson: Yes; if the first one works.
Mr. Reimer: Two things at the same time, because on the one hand there is the question of the revitalization of the rural committee. On the other hand, there is the support necessary for those who are disenfranchised and who are marginalized as a result of some of the things that we are seeing and some of the things that may come down as you are trying to rebuild the rural economy. This is the question you asked me as we were out walking yesterday. It took me a long time to provide a half answer to it.
I do not have specific answers but I would look at the local social infrastructure to see where it is working — and part of our research is to identify places where it is working as a support network for people — and to see what the obstacles are to it being able to work and to address those. They may be around issues, as I mentioned, of transportation, the local organization, the use of the facilities that are there — what we call social capital — and the use of institutions that are available and not being used. How can we free up those institutions and how can we make it possible for people to meet, to get together and to do that part of it?
On the other side, in terms of the economy, I am less well equipped to answer that one; I am sure Mr. Apedaile will be able to give a more satisfying response. Certainly around the issue of the rural urban alliances, the exploration of relationships that open up opportunities for both urban and rural people would be a direction in which I would go, and am going in some respects from a research point of view.
Senator Gustafson: I want to make one comment. Reference was given to the male population not staying in school, and in my mind, there are several reasons for that. First, they make very good money in other industries, like the oil industry and, in Ottawa here, the building of skyscrapers; however, they are very hard jobs. It is not easy to work in 20 degrees below zero conditions covered in oil. Our male population is faced with that challenge. You mentioned the B- train drivers. There are quite a few ladies that are starting to drive trucks, but if you watch here even in Ottawa, the construction workers — and I see them out there sometimes early in the morning — they start at seven o'clock. It is cold and it is no fun. Some of the male population is opting out; they are saying it is too tough. It is the same thing with farm labour. Come spring, we expect them to work 16 hours a day and produce and then come July they are told ``Well, take a holiday. We do not need you.'' Come harvest, it is the same thing. Run the combine 18 hours a day, but come November, take a holiday.
Mr. Reimer: May I respond? This is an example of the question related to the previous question about the difference between the different parts of the country. In Abitibi-Témiscamingue, where the suicide rates are high, the jobs are not hard, they are just not there; or if they are there, they are jobs that are, for example, in the service industry which are not the kind of jobs that the young males are equipped to do. The young men in that area do not think about jobs in the service industry because they are filled with stories about men who work in the bush.
It is a different forum producing a similar kind of result with respect to education, for example.
Mr. Apedaile: I am glad for the question because I have a wrap-up comment, a point I wanted to emphasize and Senator Gustafson has provided me the opportunity to do so.
Yes, we want to help the rural poor cope. Yes, we want to alleviate rural poverty. We do that quite well with our national standards and our social safety nets.
By and large, the point I make in my written presentation, Senator Gustafson, is that our national social safety nets, like old age security, employment insurance and other types of transfers, let us just call them transfers, have matched the decline in rural incomes over recent years. Dr. Bollman gave you the graphs on that subject. However, to me, the issue is not about alleviation or coping. To me the issue is that we must reduce the severity and breadth of poverty. If through our policies, as I have seen in other countries, we come 20 years later and find that the severity of poverty is worse and more people are in poverty, then we have policy failure.
We really need to invest in new governance models. We maybe even have to start talking about the relevance of the provincial construct in our federation; we certainly need to invest in rural municipal governance. In my view, our democratic practices are not up to snuff in rural Canada; our leadership layer is extremely thin. We have experienced now more than half a century of out-migration with depopulation consequences.
We need to do a lot of work to improve how we govern locally so that we can encourage and get the local initiative that is needed, even for small populations to be successful. I am reminded of a policy in a small, rural government in Japan that I worked with for five years, where they finance every year a study tour for 10 women, mostly in Europe, but somewhere else in the world, and they set up the content of the study tour. The reason is that in Japan the emancipation of women is more of an issue than here. That leadership in that community wants to progressively year by year open the vision about what is possible, and opening it through the women to create the leadership that is needed among women in that community.
The same thing applies to men, and certainly to youth. We do not have enough youth corps-type exchange programs. We do not have enough investment in rural governance and rural leadership. It is not because these people will stay and be locked in or we want them to be locked in because we do not, but because that leadership provides that integrity between the rural and metro fortunes in the country.
The last point on that theme, Madam Chairman, is that a rapidly growing number and predominance of our rural poor are Aboriginal and Metis. We are having a great difficulty engaging with Aboriginal and Metis leaders in our non-Aboriginal and non-Metis communities. Politically it is awfully difficult. We really need some breakthrough on how we start to be able to work together to build these kinds of measures that I have been talking about today, Senator Gustafson.
Senator Gustafson: I want to say that I for one appreciate the very positive approach you take to solutions and I thank you for that approach.
The Chairman: I want to thank you both for coming here. You have been marvellous witnesses because you have thought a great deal about what we are about to embark on, and certainly gave us a lot of good advice and direction in terms of the opportunities. I am glad you raised that final issue because it has not been raised within our hearings to any degree, and that is the inclusion of our Aboriginal people in this rural issue because it is significant. You have made a very fine contribution to our hearings.
Mr. Apedaile: We are grateful that you are interested in our life's work.
The committee continued in camera.