Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 11 - Evidence - Meeting of November 23, 2006
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 9:06 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. Good morning to our witness, Diane Martz. Good morning to everyone 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 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, and this work will then serve as a basis for the committee's planned travel to rural communities all across this country next year.
Today's witness is Diane Martz. Ms. Martz is the research manager at the Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence and a member of the research faculty with Saskatchewan Population Health Evaluation Research Unit. Her work focuses on rural women, rural families, family farms and rural communities. Ms. Martz was also involved in the establishment of a rural family support centre in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, and is currently taking the lead role in developing a family violence protocol in that region.
We welcome you and thank you very much for coming here on a pretty good winter day in Ottawa.
Diane Martz, Research Manager, Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence, as an individual: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to be here. It is much warmer here than it is at home.
The points I will make this morning reflect the fact that I have lived and worked and been educated on the Prairies, so most of what I am aware of is fairly focused on that part of the country, although some of our work has certainly been national.
I had a number of questions posed to me and I chose to address three of them. First, how does the experience of poverty differ for the rural and the urban poor?
I think there are a number of ways that poverty is experienced differently in rural places. The basic dimensions of poverty may be very similar in terms of lack of income and lack of access to the things that families need, but the way it plays out is different in rural areas.
Rural areas are more isolated; people must travel further to access goods and services. That costs time and money. At the same time there are few public transportation options. What used to exist is not serving many rural communities anymore. There are many places where you used to be able to get a bus that you cannot now. For elderly people and for people who are poor and do not have access to transportation, that makes it very difficult to get around.
Rural areas are more exposed to single industries which tend to be cyclical and unpredictable, and these industries are often commodities that tend to have fluctuating but lower prices. Agriculture is certainly one of those you have talked about. Forestry is another in Saskatchewan that has had a rough time recently.
There are also few good job opportunities in rural places. This is especially true for women. We looked at women working in agricultural and forestry processing industries in the province and asked them what they would be doing if they did not have those jobs. Essentially, their response was that they would be working in clerical positions or at 7- Eleven or other stores like that. Good jobs that pay more than the minimum wage are few and far between and people do not tend to leave those jobs so they do not come open very often.
Minimum wage jobs do not pay enough to afford any kind of child care, so you have to figure out how to care for your children through juggling responsibilities and family care. Those jobs also provide an income that is below any of the measures of poverty that are being discussed here.
The other point that affects both men and women is that many of the good service sector jobs are being lost. With cutbacks in health, education and government services, people who could have come back to work in those jobs after getting an education no longer have that option. As we lose more educated people, we also lose many skilled volunteers who might have contributed to community services that actually would support people who are living in poverty. The loss of jobs in education and health is especially important for women because those were traditionally areas of women's professional work; that is, areas where women could have decent jobs.
Services in rural areas are less accessible, and that ties in with the isolation component. For the most part, research shows that most services continue to be accessible within 30 minutes to an hour, but only if you have a vehicle, money to put gas in your vehicle, and time to get there. Services that low-income people might need to access and have difficulty getting to would include social services. Many rural places do not have social services on an ongoing basis. For example, we are starting to see more food banks in rural Saskatchewan. Some of those food banks that were informal structures that churches managed are now becoming formalized in communities. Legal aid is in the cities, and specialized medical services and government offices are not necessarily present in rural communities.
The other thing that came out in the photo voice project that some of the women talked to you about earlier, which was supported by the Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence, is that people who are living in poverty in cities can access amenities and educational activities for their children like art galleries, university displays, libraries and so on, which are not always present in rural areas. We lack certain amenities, although there are certainly other things that might replace them.
I think the social norms are different. Education has come up a number of times here. There are two schools of thought in rural about education. Some people working in agriculture actually see education as not necessary and even at times as a liability. We have heard hockey arena stories about people saying there is no point in getting their sons an education when they can go to the oil patch and make good-sized incomes there and do not have $40,000 debt when they are finished.
That is not necessarily the case for females. Farm families have traditionally educated females. That often was a way to give something to the girls in the family as the boys got the farm. Many women I know would probably figure they got the better deal there.
Another cultural difference is that there are some strong ideas about self-sufficiency in rural areas. That is one reason poverty is so hidden in rural places. Ideas about self-sufficiency are really important to people, especially men who are farming. Many of the men whose family farm operations are in financial difficulty blame themselves. They blame themselves for letting down the generations that came before them, that went through the Depression, that kept the farm going and that have put all of their years — almost a century in many cases — into the farm. They see themselves, in this particular financial crisis, as carrying that burden and shouldering the blame for allowing that farm to go out of business, and also for not enabling their children to farm.
Rural populations have a large proportion of elderly people who are more likely to be living in poverty. That also affects women somewhat more because women tend to live longer. In parts of the country, a large and growing population of Aboriginal people is affected. I have not seen much discussion about that here in the presentations you have heard, but it is certainly a huge issue in the Prairies.
What is the agricultural dimension of rural poverty? That is a tough question, because for the most part not much work has focused specifically on the agricultural dimension of rural poverty. We work around it all the time. None of the work I have done has looked specifically at rural poverty. I have focused on how families who are still farming have adapted to the restructuring in agriculture and on ways to adapt services to rural areas — that is, how to take the urban model of services and make them work in the rural context. Moreover, farm families work hard to maintain a lifestyle they think they should be living and poverty is quite hidden. It will take a concerted effort to find out exactly what is going on; we do not really know for sure.
As I am sure you are aware, the family farm can no longer support the vast majority of Canadian farm families. In 2003, 79 per cent of the average Canadian farm family income came from off the farm. Farm families have adapted in many ways. They have been quite resilient. They have diversified and changed their farming operations, they have taken employment off the farm, they have renegotiated the work roles in the farm and some of them have left the farm. We saw quite a large number leaving in the last census period and I expect we will see that again.
However, the situation in Saskatchewan in recent years has threatened the resilience of many farm families. Recent anecdotes include farmers not being able to pay the rent on the land they leased because this year they did not even get a crop in the ground; men going to the oil patch to work through the winter, leaving their wives, children and elderly fathers to conduct the farm business while they are away, including looking after any cattle, hauling and marketing grain, all that kind of stuff as well as what is going on in the family and in the off-farm job; children on their own running large farm machinery while both parents are at their jobs. This story was about 14-year-old children. More farm men are accessing mental health services, expressing emotions such as shame, anxiety, loss and suicidal intentions with the accompanying health impacts. In some ways, this is certainly an indicator of an increasing crisis. It is also a change, because in the past, farm men have not accessed mental health services as much as they probably should have. Youth are deferring getting a post-secondary education because the family cannot afford it. Farm family members are going to food banks, sometimes hitchhiking because they cannot afford to put gas in the truck to get there, and sometimes going to food banks in the cities so that they do not have to face their neighbours.
In terms of policies that the federal government could implement, I thought long and hard on this one. I have done some work around early childhood education recently and trying to develop an urban model that would work in a rural setting. I think that that is a phenomenally good place to start. We need a comprehensive early childhood education development and care program. It would have to have many facets. It would include licensed child care services which would make it accessible to people; child care workers would be paid a living wage; children would have access to high quality early childhood programming; and there would be support for parents. The implementation of this would have to be conducted with a high level of community input, especially in Aboriginal communities.
The rationale behind that is that a large amount of research indicates the value of a high-quality educational experience early on. It also shows that low socioeconomic status has a negative impact on early childhood development.
The child care piece is critical in rural areas. In the Humboldt area, we did some work on that as well. Only 1.9 per cent of the children under 12 years of age had access to licensed child care spaces. Even rural parents would like to have licensed spaces because for them it is an assurance of quality in child care. Without licensed facilities, you cannot get any kind of subsidy. We need that.
The Humboldt area is one of the most vibrant rural areas in the province, with manufacturing and a diversified industrial base, to some extent. You would expect that child care would be important in this region. In fact, one of the manufacturers in the region has taken this on and is supporting day care in their community.
Child care is a big issue. It is a little different in rural because it must be much more flexible. We need to find out how to take urban models and make them work in rural. You have had some discussion of the integrated hub model out of Manitoba that Donna Mitchell presented.
Child care is a huge piece in order for women to work or to improve their education, establish a career or provide additional income — because two-income families are less likely to live in poverty — and to begin to establish some security for when they retire.
The second thing I would support is to continue with the development of a federal rural policy. That started some time ago, and I am not sure where it is at right now. We have to decide what kind of a rural Canada we want to have, rather than just let the situation unfold. There are many elements to that.
The last thing is to broaden our agricultural policy. My impression is that it is very focused on trade, and we need to look at some other options in agriculture.
I will finish there and take your questions.
The Chairman: Thank you for a very good presentation. We had not heard that information in that particular way before, and we very much appreciate it.
Senator Segal: Ms. Martz, thank you for coming all this way. We are delighted you have made time in your busy schedule to help us through this process. We know it is pro bono activity on your part and we do not take it for granted.
There are several strains to the analysis of rural poverty that we have picked up as a committee, listening to academics and professors and scholars and others who have worked in the agricultural sector. There is one strain that can best be described as saying, ``It is about the money.'' Poverty is about not having enough money. We can slice it and dice it and cut it and analyze it, but if we do not get people the money they need to live with some measure of dignity and self-respect, then we have an intolerable situation for our fellow Canadians in that circumstance.
Another strain says that the situation is actually much more complex than that. One academic said that someone on a farm who may not have any income really is not as poor as someone who does not have any income and is not on a farm. The first person has a farm, so there may be some growing activity and some food and other things, so that individual is not facing the kind of poverty someone with equivalent income off the farm would be facing. It struck me as an interesting analysis. I did not buy into it, but the academic believed it sincerely.
Another view that was advanced said that it is all about the clustering of assets, jobs and services, and if we can get more assets clustered out there we would be generating more opportunity.
As a committee, it is our job to go through all the best advice we can and come up with recommendations to government and our colleagues in the Senate.
You have been around this patch for a long time in different and constructive ways. I notice you are part of a grant group building capacity in the new rural economy, which strikes me as a fascinating and not unrelated area of study, based on what we are doing here.
If you got a call one morning from the Prime Minister of the day and he or she said: ``I want to make you Minister of Agriculture. I will put you in the Senate. You do not have to get elected. I will give you $20 billion. You get to make one decision, one choice that you think is the most important for alleviating rural poverty, and I will support whatever it is.'' What would you recommend? What would you do?
Senator Tkachuk: Take the appointment.
Senator Segal: Your presentation was a very fulsome reflection on some of the different strains and challenges, and I think your considered judgment would be of immense value to us.
Ms. Martz: Some of the ways that Europeans have looked at this problem are very interesting. They use a multi- functionality approach; they look at farming as more than producing a commodity. People who are on farms play a number of roles, including some very important environmental roles. Farms are places for sequestering carbon and protecting watersheds and so on, and those are roles that can be supported. I would look seriously at that.
Many farmers would tell you that they want to earn what they get. They want to get a fair price for the products they produce, and I would consider products broadly to include environmental products. That would probably be one of the more palatable ways to spend that money on a number of fronts.
Senator Segal: Currently in Canada people who live in the North get certain tax considerations. In the Province of Ontario people who live north of the French River pay less for car licences and the province tries to have lower taxation on gas there because people have to travel more to get from place to place. There is a series of things we now do normatively on the North-South divide.
Are you suggesting that for strategic reasons, whether because we want people on the land or because of environmental things or other due diligence that we expect our farmers to do — whether they are having a good financial year or not — you would be in support of some framework that paid or otherwise compensated farmers for doing that, independent of what the crop cycle might be generating for them in that particular financial year? Is that the sort of area you are suggesting?
Ms. Martz: I think you could go that way or you tie it to particular kinds of actions. For example, I visited a farm in England where they had planted hybrid poplars; the role of that was around carbon sequestration, and there was a value to that function. I was thinking of a more active kind of role in terms of the environment.
There would certainly have to be an active management component. I agree with you that there are certainly strategic elements in farming around having people on the land. I drive around a certain amount down in the Frenchman River basin and in Southern Saskatchewan and there are very few people there. It has occurred to me there that 100 years ago there were bison and Aboriginal people there. In 100 years, what will be on this land? People are so few and far between there.
When I drive from Regina to Saskatoon, I cannot get gas after a certain time at night. An empty landscape is not a landscape that I think I want to see, so there needs to be some mechanism to ensure that we have people on the land.
The other security element of this is food. Even though we import a lot of our food and we are in a position where we can get food from everywhere, that is the situation now; we do not know what the situation will be 50 years from now. If we want to maintain our capacity to produce our own food, we need to maintain our agricultural sector.
Senator Segal: We had this problem before in our history with lots of land and not enough people and we addressed it. We addressed it by reaching out to the British Isles, to the Ukraine and to Eastern Europe, and we made it easy for people to come over and get a stake and start. Would you be in favour of doing that sort of thing now?
Ms. Martz: There are initiatives in that regard, and I think it is a good idea. However, the world has changed a lot since 100 years ago, when the bulk of Saskatchewan's population came, and most immigrants now are looking to urban areas. It is a hard sell in some ways to get people to move into rural.
Again, in area around Humboldt, which keeps coming up all the time, people have taken a very active perspective on this. One employer goes to the Ukraine to recruit people. They also recognize that in bringing people over you must work with your communities to make them hospitable. Newcomers need to be welcomed and integrated into the community. Regional meetings are being held around how to foster immigration in that area. Much work needs to be done at the community level to make it attractive to people.
Senator Peterson: Ms. Martz, I want to discuss briefly your federal rural policy. Whenever we try to devise a federal policy, we run into enormous problems because of the regional differences across the country and even within a province from north to south. How detailed do you think this template should be? How far should the framework go, do you think, in order to have some reasonable success?
Ms. Martz: We are restricted on how detailed it can be by provincial jurisdiction — by other jurisdictions, essentially. When I was thinking about this, I tried to come up with things that the federal government could have a look at, such as communications and transportation, which the federal government has focused on in the past. For example, even though we tend to think we have broadband access in rural areas, communication is not without its glitches. In fact, it is a problem. There is much of that kind of overarching infrastructure that the federal government has supported and could continue to support.
To answer your question specifically, the framework would have to be broad because potentially you would tread on many other toes. One of our problems is that most of our provincial governments do not have a rural policy either. Rural has been left to evolve at the mercy of market forces. We do not have a plan but we need one in order to move forward in a positive way.
Senator Peterson: Thank you.
Senator Oliver: I was quite interested in your response to Senator Segal's very broad-reaching question about the amount of $20 billion. I was interested that you raised, as a possibility, looking at the European multi-functionality approach. This committee went to Europe and to study farms in Ireland. We also looked at what happens when the European community gives money to farmers in effect to not farm but to let the fields remain uncultivated and untouched so that wild birds and animals can come and to attract tourists.
Is that a picture you had for a Canadian farm if we were to adopt that form of multi-functionality?
Ms. Martz: There would have to be many different options in various parts of the country because we have such a diverse environment and different parts of the country have different opportunities. For example, in Saskatchewan, where we have very low population densities, opportunities that might be suitable for Maritime, Ontario or Quebec farms would not be that viable. It might look very different in Saskatchewan than it would look in another province. In some regions a smaller tract of land could be returned to forest area as a tourist destination. Whereas, on the Prairies, returning large tracts of lands to their natural habitat would take a phenomenal investment because there is just so much land. You would probably want to look to other productive ways to use that land.
Senator Oliver: In your paper, you talk about paying farm families for environmental stewardship. Would that apply to some of the large farms in Saskatchewan, in your model?
Ms. Martz: I think it would apply. Certainly, the carbon credit idea is one option because carbon can be sequestered not only through trees but also through cropping. Riparian management, where people are paid to manage the areas along streams to maintain good water quality, might be another option. Many farmers keep parts of their land out of cultivation as habitat. Perhaps more of that could be done as well. There are some options.
Senator Oliver: If a farmer had land that he kept out cultivation, where would the cash flow come from?
Ms. Martz: That farmer would need some kind of support for such an activity. That support could be tax-based or in the form of payment for an environmental service.
Senator Oliver: Some of the farms we looked at in Ireland a few years ago were much better off financially than they were when they were farming with their few head of cattle and sheep. Yet, many of their fields were laying idle because they were not allowed to cultivate them or grow anything on them. It is quite a unique model. It also means a massive infusion of money by the European community into countries like Ireland.
Ms. Martz: Yes.
Senator Oliver: You also talked about local food and quality foods. Again, this is goes back to farming and production. Were you thinking of organic farming?
Ms. Martz: Depending on where you are in the country, there are many opportunities to engage consumers and encourage them to buy more from their local farmers, thereby creating opportunities for local farmers. Where there is higher population density, such an option would be much more likely for people. Many good restaurants across the country are starting to source and advertise that they are sourcing their food locally. People in Canada still look at all food sources as being basically the same. My impression is that in other parts of the world people have a greater sense of the quality difference in foods and they tend to look for those quality foods. We assume that we have good quality food and that there is not much difference.
Part of a strategy, not a whole strategy, might be to start people sourcing locally for their foods and to appreciate what they have locally. Certainly, the area of organic foods is expanding. Saskatchewan has the largest number of organic farmers in the country, many of them in grains. However, with the climate being what it has been over the last couple of years, they are running into serious problems. They are not receiving the prices they used to receive for their products. As well, they are finding land management more difficult with much higher levels of moisture. The organic sector overall has been successful because there is an element of control. The farmers I am aware of produce the product, market it over the Internet and, in that way, control the product quite far down the line. They do not have to pass control off to someone else.
Senator Oliver: Such as a marketing board?
Ms. Martz: Yes, but I would not say that we should not have marketing boards. That element of control by organic farmers certainly gave them a much better return. Many of these farmers are packaging and marketing their products. Organic farming is much more in demand than it used to be and we are beginning to see larger corporations enter that market, which will have a negative impact on the smaller producers.
Senator Oliver: Thank you.
Senator Tkachuk: Ms. Martz, I have a couple questions. You had talked about the need for child care and, using Humboldt as an example, you said that there are difficulties but that one of the manufacturers is starting to expand its daycare services. As well, you talked about minimum-wage jobs. Is there an opportunity for people in rural areas to open their own daycare centres? Why do we have a daycare problem when we have people looking for work?
Ms. Martz: There are a couple of issues around daycare as an employer, one being that the wages in child care are very low. The women taking care of the children receive very low wages so people are reluctant to invest in this area of business over the long term. Women will often set up a daycare in their homes while their children are young but they do not see this as a long-term career. Therefore, they do not get educated and licensed in child care. In today's world, to run a licensed child care you need to have an early childhood education certificate and so on. A few of the problems in this area are driven, to a large extent, by the very low wages in child care.
Senator Tkachuk: Is it a similar situation in urban areas? I know that many people have child care in their homes and take in 10 or 12 kids from the early years on and then they will have latchkey kids after four o'clock. They make quite a good living running the service out of their own homes. Are the problems that you speak of related to training or opportunity or lack of base to support that kind of enterprise? I do not understand.
Ms. Martz: Most child care that you find in rural areas is set up in an informal way.
Senator Tkachuk: That is good, is it not?
Ms. Martz: Parents are looking for something more formal so that they can be assured that their kids are in a good situation and are being educated while in the child care environment. Parents would like to have a higher quality situation but, at the same time, the cost of that is quite prohibitive.
The other thing about rural is that you have many people working shifts, such as in hospitals or manufacturing plants. There is more call for non-traditional kinds of daycare, other than 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Many working parents need times that are earlier or later in the day and sometimes need child care more frequently than at other times. Women working in the hog barns have to be at work at 7 a.m. The regular daycare hours do not work for them. It is more complicated in rural areas because there are fewer people but they have a greater variety of need. It is a more difficult to figure out what to do.
Senator Tkachuk: What would happen if we did nothing? Outside the fact that I am from the government and am here to help you, which often scares me, what if the federal government did not interfere in the process? Would rural communities be worse off or would they get better, like Humboldt? Humboldt is a great example for the rest the country, and there are other communities like it that have been successful. They have taken it upon themselves to solve their problems. Kindersley is another tremendous example. Rosetown is starting to do a lot of work on economic development. Many communities are taking a positive attitude to their situations and making improvements on their own that are making a difference. They are receiving a little help because they have taken the initiative to present their plans to governments. I am really worried about this. What would happen if government did nothing?
Ms. Martz: Rural is in a position of decline. Where I live, there are some bright spots but there are many places where it is pretty rough going and we are seeing diminishing populations. Humboldt is probably the only small town in Saskatchewan that has not lost population, according to the 1996 to 2001 census. If we do nothing, then what is happening now will continue to happen. I am not sure that is the direction we should be taking. Places like Humboldt have not done it all on their own, necessarily. Having capacity allows you to link to available programs. Humboldt had that with St. Peter's College and the monks, who educated the farmers early on. There is a culture in Humboldt. It is an interesting area because that culture is a bit different than elsewhere. The manufacturing businesses were farm-grown whereby farmers innovated various different things that they needed and then ramped that up to manufacturing. For a long time it has been a special kind of area. Where communities do not have the capacity necessarily to do that, government can play a role in both building and mentoring that kind of capacity.
The models program that Ms. Donna Mitchell talked about, the rural secretariat, is running and they have taken a number of successful models in one part of Canada and tried to put them into other parts of Canada to see what would happen and whether they are transportable and successful. I am working with one of those in the area around Outlook. It is a community collaboration project model and brings a number of resources into the picture. There are certainly monetary resources, but a big resource is people working with the federal and provincial governments who act as bridges for the community to gain access to the people they need to talk to in order to get stuff done in their community. That has meant roads, recently, and data, so that they can map, plan and do information-based decision making. That model has provided the connection to government and has been very useful for the community of Outlook. It has moved them along much faster than they would have moved otherwise.
Senator Tkachuk: In our province, we are all aware of how governments have centralized so many functions, such as schools and hospitals. In Saskatchewan, there is a need to drive into Saskatoon and Regina for just about everything. Schools are centralized so kids have to take school buses and leave as early as 5:30 a.m. and then come home late in the evening. Somehow we thought that was the way to save money but I have no idea how. I have never believed in that kind of system; nonetheless, that is what we are doing. I do not think we have saved any money, and now we are talking about paying people on a farm for growing trees or taking land out of production. None of that makes any sense, whatsoever.
Can you reverse that tide? There are no government services, so why would you live out there? Unless there are health care services and opportunities to have a family and not have to send your kid to school at 5:30 a.m. on a school bus, why would you want to live there? No matter what government would do, why would there be any incentive, whatsoever?
Ms. Martz: People live there because they love it.
Senator Tkachuk: Exactly, so we should not have to pay them to live there. There should be opportunities so that they can live there.
Ms. Martz: Yes, I would agree. Part of our problem is that we have not looked innovatively at how we do certain things. For example, we tend to look at schools only as places to educate kids from ages 6 to18 years. However, our schools could be much more than that in many communities; they could be places to house daycare centres or places for seniors. Schools could have many more functions than they currently have. We might have kept some of our schools open if we had looked at other functions for them.
Senator Tkachuk: Perhaps it is a matter of not spending all that money on urban kids getting daycare and early child care from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. so we could have babysitters for lawyers to go to work. Then, we could apply that money to schools in rural Canada so that when kids reach the age of six, they could go to school in a small town in Saskatchewan rather than have to get on the bus and travel for an hour and a half or two hours.
Ms. Martz: That was one reason I made the point in the early child care piece that you have to have it targeted to rural. The urban voice is so much stronger. There have been recent occurrences of resources in rural often being pulled and redirected into urban. Therefore, we have to take a forceful approach to ensure that those resources go where they need to go.
Senator Tkachuk: I am with you there. Thank you.
Senator Callbeck: Thank you for coming this morning. I want to ask you about a report that the Centres of Excellence for Women's Health released back in 2004. Your centre was part of this. It was entitled ``Rural, Remote and Northern Women's Health: Policy and Research Directions.'' My understanding is that you held several workshops about that report. I do not know whether it was just in your province or whether this applied across Canada. That is one question.
You identified many areas, such as the infrastructure in rural Canada, the lack of mental health services, the lack of health services in general, the fact that youth are leaving the rural areas for jobs and so on. You set up action plans. I am wondering how this is developing. Are the action plans actually being carried out, and do you have any financial resources to do that? I would like to hear your comments.
Ms. Martz: The report was across Canada, and the focus groups that led to the report were held across all the provinces and in the North.
Regarding the recommendations from that report, there are no resources to carry out elements from the action plan. We did get some funding in Saskatchewan, and we are currently wrapping up this project. We got funding from Status of Women Canada to go ask rural Saskatchewan women, ``These are the broad national recommendations. What do they mean to you and how do you see this taking shape in your community?''
This weekend we are having a policy session. We had workshops around the province. We are bringing some of the women together and will sit down and write concrete policy recommendations as to what should happen at all levels. When we did the workshops in the communities, we talked to women about what they were doing in their own communities. We asked, ``What are the things you as an individual or a group of women are actually doing here?'' They talked about initiatives around family violence. They talked about providing some of the social dimension and social support for women that has been lost in rural, the different things they were doing at the local level. Policy happens at a number of levels, so when we meet this weekend we want to flesh out what individuals can do, what needs to be done perhaps by business and communities, and what needs to be done by municipal, provincial and potentially federal governments. We are still working with that data.
Senator Callbeck: That is this weekend in Saskatchewan?
Ms. Martz: Yes.
Senator Callbeck: You received money for that from Status of Women Canada?
Ms. Martz: Yes.
Senator Callbeck: Did other provinces get funding?
Ms. Martz: I do not think other provinces took it any further.
Senator Callbeck: Thank you.
Ms. Martz: It will provide the basis for more work to come in the future.
Senator Gustafson: Good morning, and thank you for appearing from Saskatchewan, because I think a special situation exists there. When I was first elected down here, the first person I talked to was Tommy Douglas, and he made a statement that seems to have been forgotten. He said that Saskatchewan had a great future because it has 40 per cent of the arable land. We seem to have forgotten about the arable land. Much of what we are talking about here is provincial responsibility, but, as you know, Saskatoon and Regina run the province. They have the seats and the votes, and they pretty well forgot rural Saskatchewan. I am not a great supporter of the NDP, but Tommy Douglas used to go out and talk to the farmers and say, ``What do you need?'' That resulted in rural electrification, water projects and many other projects. That is not happening any more. In fact, we have a rural-urban split — I should not use the ward ``war,'' but it is there, and Senator Peterson will back me up on that. It is not good for the country, and it is not good for the land.
It was suggested here that money is a problem. In Saskatchewan we have had three years with a negative income on farms. You know all about that. If you do not have some money to deal with the situation, what will you do? That is not the case in Alberta. Whenever the federal government came up with a program, the Alberta government was able to meet them head on and said, ``We will match what you put in, and more.'' In Saskatchewan, we always had to take less and negotiate for something to keep the wolf from the door. We have a problem with provincial responsibility, and it is a big subject.
I will use a couple of examples that could and do work. There are some great advantages to rural. For instance, we produce the best hockey players in the world. They do not come out of Regina and Saskatoon; they come out of the little towns like Humboldt — Gordie Howe, for instance. The truth is that there are opportunities, but we are missing them. There should be no reason why a kid in Saskatchewan cannot play hockey. He has a better opportunity than a kid in Toronto. Many of those kids do not get a chance to do the things our kids do provincially, but we have been missing it. SaskPower used to put up money to keep the artificial ice going in a rural area, but they have cut that off. That should have never been cut off. It should have been built upon. There are things in rural Canada that we can do, but politically they do not buy votes because there are no votes there. We are 2 per cent of the population.
I guess you could build on that. I think of places where we received grants federally and provincially to build rinks and centralize them so several small towns could come together, and the kids could be bussed in there. Every young person would have an opportunity. We sort of decided that does not matter any more. Many of these small communities cannot support the artificial ice any more. They cannot pay the power bill, while at the same time SaskPower is making phenomenal returns.
Ms. Martz: We spent a lot of time and effort focused on urban Canada for 20 or more years across the board. Even at the University of Saskatchewan, there are very few people outside the College of Agriculture looking at agriculture on a fairly large scale and focusing on small communities, small farms or family farms. We have decided that rural just was not the place to be, and so we have really moved our resources and our attention to urban Canada. That is changing, to some extent, at the moment, which I think is very good.
I can tell you a story about a recent election. A member of Parliament who was running in a constituency that included Saskatoon and the area east of it told people in a rural community that he did not have to go out there and talk to them because he got elected in Saskatoon. You are dead on. The political power has certainly gone from rural, and so they have had a hard time making their presence and their issues known.
That has happened in Saskatchewan, one of the more rural provinces in the country. We tend to have a lack of interest in what is going on in rural issues. Governments have spent a lot of time saying that rural is not just agriculture. I know the point they are trying to make, that there are more things going on out in rural, such as forestry and manufacturing and so forth. However, from a farmer's perspective, it is as if farmers are no longer important.
David Freshwater, who presented to you recently, made a comment at a conference I attended. He said that he drove from one large city in the U.S. to another one, and everything around him was agriculture; so how can agriculture not be important? Farmers steward huge amounts of land. Agriculture is still important, in my mind, at least.
Senator Gustafson: This is a subject that has no end, and Senator Segal has capitalized on the whole idea of doing something about it. Canada really needs a made-in-Canada agricultural policy that goes to the heart of things, and we have not got that.
Where does one begin? Most of the witnesses we had said that there is no one silver bullet, no one answer. However, a number of things can be done, and we are not doing them. Those things are collapsing.
I will give you the example of the little town of Macoun. It had all kinds of problems with its sewer system, but try to get some support from the provincial government to do something about it. Similarly, infrastructure is breaking down in all the small towns; they do not have the money locally to fix it, and they are not getting support from the provincial government to do it.
Ms. Martz: Exactly. This may not be a solution for every town and every service, but in some areas regionalization may be a solution, for example, in water treatment. Every place does not need a water treatment technician. It is something that can be shared, and you have a number that could work within a region. Regions need to get together and figure out what they can share, what they need as individuals, and how they can make the system work.
I have held community meetings where one town down the road will not come if the meeting is held in a particular other town because there is so much rivalry. We need to get past that and start working together on a regional basis.
Senator Gustafson: Politically, it will never happen. It will take initiative. Almost everything that happens starts with the land, whether you have fisheries, lumber industry, oil, gas, mining or agriculture. It all comes out of the land. However, we have, as a country, decided that we will put everything back into the urban centres. If we do not, we will have major problems.
Let us draw a comparison between Canada and the United States. The U.S. has a farm bill that looks at the farm economy over ten years. Most of that is concentrated on the rural U.S. I raised a Canadian farm bill idea yesterday, and I got shot right out of the water. That is what we need. We need a long-term program, and that was part of the recommendation of this committee, if you recall. One main thing was a made-in-Canada farm program. This committee has to activate the governments to understand that, regardless of political affiliation, one way or the other, with the backing of the urban centre people, this could be done through the environment. We can get the attention of the urban dweller when we start talking environment. When we talk economics, we do not get anywhere.
Ms. Martz: You have to decide what arguments play in your favour. We have not been particularly successful until now at convincing the urban population that rural is worth paying attention to.
The Chairman: Senator Gustafson and I have been around a long time. The last report we put out, which was back in June, did have the farm bill idea in it. We must keep pushing on that, regardless of what else is taking place. It is about the only thing that will draw focus directly to the areas we are all concerned about.
Senator Mitchell: I wonder whether you could comment on women and rural poverty, in particular. Is a disproportionate burden of rural poverty borne by women?
Ms. Martz: I believe so, particularly in a couple of ways. One is that the elderly tend more to be women, and many elderly women still remain in rural areas. The second group of women in poverty is single mothers. I do not have any statistics on that. My sense is that many women move out of the rural environment when they are in that situation because coping is somewhat easier in the urban setting where you have more access to services.
Women also get involved in performing emotional and caring kinds of work in families. Therefore, when the family is in poverty, women are responsible for shoring everyone up. We tend to see farm women accessing mental health services about their family situation, perhaps what is going on with their husbands and so on, whereas the men will not necessarily come in. Through the emotional work that they do, women bear a lot of the pressure and the brunt of trying to make do and provide food and everything else for the kids. The caring function of women is big.
Senator Mitchell: A recent suggestion by the government is to allow the splitting of pension income. It is interesting that there would be considerably fewer pensions in rural Canada than there would be in urban Canada, and that policy will not particularly help rural Canada.
Could you comment on the idea of allowing a family in which one partner stays home to purchase CPP benefits with the income of the other partner? Often it is women, and particularly in rural settings, although rural women work on the farm. Have you thought about the income earner in the family who gets CPP being able to buy CPP for someone who chooses to stay home and work in the home? As a society, we do not very often put economic value on that work.
Ms. Martz: No, nor do we put it on work on the farm. Some of the work we have done on farm women shows that even women who say they do not do anything on the farm spend three hours a day working on the farm.
I have not thought about it, but on the face of it, it is probably a beneficial thing to do because farm women have no opportunity to amass any kind of security for when they are past 65 or past working age. I hesitate to say old age. Farm women have mentioned that lack of security to me before. It sounds like that would provide some income where people are not getting income now.
Senator Mitchell: I am very interested in your comments on early childhood education. There is all kinds of evidence of the positive impact that has. I am interested that on that particular point you emphasized Aboriginal communities.
This is meant to be far less partisan that it will sound, but did you have a chance, in the context of those ideas, to assess the early childhood education proposal of the previous government? Would you have been able to assess its application to rural Canada? It is a big question, I know.
Ms. Martz: When we first looked at the proposal, it was uncertain how things would play out, so I have not looked specifically at it.
In our project, we recommended that funding needed to go into centres to provide the programming and so on to set up daycares. In rural, that infrastructure is lacking. Without a way to create those daycare spaces and those licensed child care situations, there would be nothing for parents to access even if they had money. Having money does not necessarily give one access to a service if the service is not there.
Senator Mitchell: I am always interested and often excited by those places where social policy initiatives converge with business advantage; public health care is one of them. A more subtle one, although becoming increasingly important, is something that Canada West Foundation has emphasized in recent studies. Specifically, the labour shortages — particularly in Alberta, where I am from — point to the real need, from an economic point of view, to focus on Aboriginal communities and their tremendous workforce, and even potentially greater contribution from their workforce. Of course, they are rural and often, unfortunately, in poverty.
Early childhood education is one of those areas — trying to find a way to deliver it to those communities; also, distance learning, and trying to deliver it to those communities, and to all rural communities. Could you comment on distance learning? Has that come up in your studies or discussions?
Ms. Martz: I have been part of distance learning at times. I think distance learning offers some very good possibilities for people who want to stay in their communities and get an education. For example, we have an environmental studies program at the University of Saskatchewan. I have always been concerned that not many Aboriginal students enter that program. It has become apparent that students from places like La Ronge are reticent to come Saskatoon to do that. Providing that kind of an education in places like La Ronge and other remote places is beneficial.
You have to be very motivated and able to be self-directed for distance education to work. It is not a panacea, and not without its need for support as well for the students who are trying to learn in that mode.
Senator Segal: Ms. Martz, I have three specific questions and I would be very interested in your perspective on them.
We have heard anecdotally and in other ways that the income collapse issue in farming in rural Canada has produced some increased incidence of violence and family abuse. There has been increased criminal activity, increased activity with respect to crystal meth and increased activity relating to alcohol and substance abuse generally. We have heard that some of the numbers in rural Canada with respect to death by gunshot have gone up while they have been moderating in other parts of the country in urban Canada. There has been an increase in grow ops and other ways for people to generate some income.
My first question would be what are you seeing of any of these phenomena in your own work.
My second question would be what is your judgment, based on your frame of reference, as to the role of the co-ops. Where are they as compared to where they used to be? How central are they as agencies that make a difference because of the coming together of the strong co-operative movement in history, especially in Saskatchewan, and the business activity which is done on a mutual benefit basis? I would be interested in your perspective on that.
Then I want to raise with you my darkest fear, which is that in departments of agriculture and finance across the country, without regard to the politics of the party in power, people are saying that if we just wait, this problem will solve itself. We will have fewer farmers to worry about because they will leave the land; they will go to where there are jobs. In Ontario today, only 7 per cent of our farms are held by an ensuing generation. In many of the meetings of this committee, we have talked about that phenomenon in the various commodity sectors.
I would be interested in your perspective on those three issues.
Ms. Martz: On the first issue, in terms of more criminal kinds of behaviours and so on, what I have heard anecdotally — again, we have not looked at this systematically — is that some of the mental health cases that are being seen, certainly with people under stress and so on, do involve incidences of family violence. The Farm Stress Line is documenting that as well. When people get very stressed, some of those behaviours seem to come out.
In terms of grow ops and crystal meth, we are doing a study on rural youth and drugs at the centre. We are in the process of doing a fairly large survey with youth, so we do not have any numbers yet. Some of the young people who work in my office were prompted to start this study because of what they were hearing in the bars and around town about the incidence of different kinds of drugs. Crystal meth focuses people's attention, but my sense is that alcohol will emerge as probably a much more serious problem.
The depopulation of rural Canada allows opportunities for people to undertake those kinds of activities without scrutiny. Also, farmyards are not attended anymore, so you can get the chemicals you need or steal them. It is not necessarily the people living in rural areas who are doing those activities. Rather, people are taking advantage of the depopulation of rural areas; that is what you are seeing in some of those situations.
There are still some strong cooperative initiatives, where farmers are getting together to put up inland terminals in some cases. Not all of them are the big companies; some of them are farm owned. Farmers are looking at coming together around the potential of ethanol. Farmers are looking for opportunities to get together and do things.
Credit unions are about the only banking opportunity in rural these days. They are the only ones who have stuck around. Co-operatives are still there in the rural areas. They are changing, as credit unions and co-ops are changing in some of the ways that they are being funded and managed.
Not doing anything goes back to what Senator Gustafson was talking about regarding selling the importance of rural to urban. Rural has a huge role to play, but an awful lot of urban people do not necessarily see that. To some extent it goes back to those environmental arguments that the urban water supplies depend on rural, and potentially air quality depends on rural. Urban people put their garbage in rural. From an environmental perspective, we might be able to make arguments about how important rural areas are for urban.
In a country the size of Canada, it is sometimes hard to make those arguments. One of the comments that I made earlier reflects that as well. What will happen if nothing changes? It is not the kind of world I want to see.
The Chairman: In recent times it has almost taken an enormous crisis to make urbanites realize what goes on. I am referring to the BSE issue in cattle. Oddly enough, and happily enough, it struck a chord which I believe made Canada the first country that had to deal with this cattle illness in which the consumption of beef increased rather than decreased. That was kind of a flash into what responses can be if the story is told. It should not take a nationwide crisis to make that happen; however, Canadians did respond.
Senator Callbeck: Dr. Martz, I wanted to ask you about the Community Futures Program. I come from Prince Edward Island, where the program has been able to accomplish some good things in rural areas. I am sure you are familiar with it; the federal government gives money to local community organizations to help them identify and implement solutions to their problems.
Is this program used much in Saskatchewan?
Ms. Martz: Yes. It is a very important program in Saskatchewan. In Saskatchewan we have our regional economic development authorities and we also have the Community Futures Program. In some places, where they have been most successful, they are working together. In the area around Outlook they have combined their territory and resources and are working together to deliver services and support to the surrounding area. If that had happened more broadly across Saskatchewan, it would have had more benefits than it currently does. They definitely do some very good work in the province.
Senator Callbeck: Do you feel this program should be expanded?
Ms. Martz: I think there are opportunities to expand the program and perhaps to increase the loan base so that the program could foster more business start-ups and the like. In the area with which I am familiar, they do try to support innovation around the agricultural products that are being produced. Yes, I think it has been a good program.
Senator Mahovlich: Money seems to influence many people. Fort McMurray is a boom town. Did you find that many rural people have moved to Fort McMurray during the past ten years? Have people left schools and gone to work?
Ms. Martz: It seems that mostly men go up to Fort McMurray. Families looking for housing in Fort McMurray find it very expensive; I think the cheapest house is $300,000. Many men will leave their farms to go up to Fort McMurray to work during the winter and come back in the spring to do the seeding and so on. Many young men are going to Fort McMurray and they pay off the student loans.
Senator Mahovlich: Thus we are losing many of the young people. What about the education programs in Fort McMurray? Are they keeping up with the boom?
Ms. Martz: I have no idea on that one.
A road is being built in Saskatchewan from La Loche across to Fort McMurray, which will open up quick access to Fort McMurray for a number of the Aboriginal and Metis communities. That will have a huge impact on that northwest corner of Saskatchewan.
Senator Mahovlich: That is a place where they may get theatres, arts and many programs because of the situation.
Ms. Martz: It is because of the number of people there. Like any rapidly growing community, it has its good and challenging elements.
The Chairman: Fort McMurray is a vibrant community.
I was pleased to hear you talk the way you did about the Community Futures Program. In my province, Alberta, it has always been an extremely helpful and uncomplicated program out on the land, out in the smaller communities. Sometimes the program is underplayed or downplayed in the larger cities. It seems that the only people who know how much it has worked are those in the smaller communities. As usual, it is hard to get the message out.
I think that through our relationships with the various governments, members of this committee should really make a point of talking about this program, because from time to time it seems to be dwindling off and thought of as being not that important. It is that important. In fact, in some cases it is the only thing going on as an advantage and a help where it is needed most. That is something we can, in our travels, shoehorn in a bit and put some pressure on. It would be a shame if the program were shut down because the value of it was not understood here.
That was a great discussion today and I want to thank you very much for coming. You obviously are at the heart of many things concern us. It is good to hear from someone from the land who is actually doing this work and we wish you the very best. Our paths will probably cross again.
The committee adjourned.