A Bradford councillor was part of a panel discussion in Ottawa on Thursday on the economic future of the country's rural and small communities.
Canada 2020 held a panel to discuss the launch of a new research report authored by Senior Fellow Matthew Mendelsohn.
The report looks at how smaller and remote communities are set up to offer a host of opportunities across the country, while also facing unique challenges. The twin transitions taking place across societies—towards net zero and digital—will be at the heart of community economic development in Canada over the next decade.
“My one message is collectively we all need to work together to invest and plan to grow sustainably because we’re going to be growing and we need to collaborate to help manage that planning, otherwise we’re not going to manage that growth well,” said Mendelsohn.
The panel included Bradford West Gwillimbury Ward 2 Coun. Jonathan Scott along with Mendelsohn, Canada’s Minister of Rural Economic Development Gudie Hutchings, Shorefast Founder & CEO Zita Cobb, Chief Kelly LaRocca of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, and Smart Prosperity Senior Director Mike Moffatt, as they discussed how policy and programs can be designed with all communities in mind.
“Our government knows that rural Canada is a land of opportunity and the building of the economy of tomorrow does start in rural Canada,” said Hutchings. “There are challenges but with those challenges are opportunities, and we have got to take advantage of those opportunities.
“There’s housing, the gaps in community infrastructure, transit and access, healthcare and childcare, and the change in the climate. The other sad part that we’ve got to address is the exodus of young people to cities. The access to reliable and affordable internet is key, I call it the equalizer for rural Canada and urban Canada.”
Mendelsohn says the question of inevitable urbanization has always been present in public policy discussions, but the last three years have revealed new opportunities across the country.
“I really think we’re at a moment where we can collectively commit ourselves to renewing the social contract in Canada in a way that is inclusive and ensures quality of opportunity and good quality of life for every Canadian regardless of where they live or the size of their community,” he added.
As Canada has grown and inflation has impacted the housing market, it’s presented new challenges over the last half decade that need to be addressed for opportunities to be taken advantage of by rural and smaller communities.
“Over the last four or five years, there’s been problems with growth (as smaller communities) become suburbs of the GTA because of the housing prices,” said Moffatt. “These communities are facing dual challenges where they still have the challenge of blue-collar labour displacement—and issues that come with that, drug abuse and homelessness—while at the same time they’re gentrifying to the point a house in Tillsonburg costs more than a Tokyo condo. We’re in a unique situation where we’re still trying to deal with the challenges from de-industrialization while at the same time trying to figure out how to navigate a new world of population growth and high real estate values.”
If Canada is going to be a country where people and culture thrive, Cobb says there needs to be an understanding of the importance of putting right systems into place in each community regardless of its size.
“We have a scale problem,” said Cobb. “There’s something like 6,000 communities in this country, a third of us live in communities that are 50,000 or less and in those communities there’s assets. The big question of humans everywhere is, how do the parts belong to the whole? What are the systems that support this? We’ve got to figure out the systems that support different scales.”
With the growth of Canada and the population boom in towns like Bradford West Gwillimbury, the need for federal, provincial, and municipal governments to be in lockstep has never been more critical to rural and smaller communities.
“The massive growth is its own set of challenges,” said Scott. “When the report talks about growing past rural to being a suburb, we’re living that (in Bradford). Placemaking and collaboration is what it’s becoming all about, and we need to be able to work well with the province and the federal government on these pieces because the sustainability is going to be driven by our GO Train Station and densifying near there.
“The placemaking is going to be driven by re-doing a complete streets transformation of our downtown. We work quite well together (the provincial and federal governments), but I’ll paraphrase a person who is well known in this town, better is always possible. And, to paraphrase another eminent progressive politician, Stacey Abrams, rural Canada is a cheap date. Every ounce of federal support really matters.”
With many smaller communities feeling local collaboration and infrastructure for social services and economic infrastructure and hubs for innovation are needed, Mendelsohn asked Scott how small municipalities plan for growth while ensuring the services and infrastructure are there to support it.
“We’ve seen suburban sprawl and recognizing in Ontario the Planning Act has changed in the last few weeks, we’re still trying to sort all of that out,” said Scott. “Housing, even in a town growing as quickly as ours, is a huge challenge. I have a lot of people who still commute into the city rather than working from home or in town. Trying to piece all of these together is a challenge, but we’re trying to do it in a way where we’re prioritizing job creation. We have to recognize a lot of our economic vitality is going to come from entrepreneurship.”
Building on Scott’s point about planning and collaboration, Moffatt looked at why that isn’t always necessarily prioritized in communities.
“Where we see this go wrong is the immediate need to create more sprawl,” said Moffatt. “You might have some budget pressures and you have the community say we have a bunch of land over there, let’s just build 2,000 single detached homes and get a bunch of development charges. That’s where you have a problem.
“I sympathize with these smaller communities in the sense that they’re damned if they do, they’re damned if they don’t. If they don’t build, they’re going to have a massive affordability crisis but if they do build, they’re basically going to have a bunch of families moving in from the GTA. (They’re) trying to create the conditions of affordability. Despite those pressures, you do need to step back and know the decisions have 50, 75, and 100-year consequences.
Finally, Chief LaRocca talked about how the 104 First Nations that are a part of First Nations Lands Management can be strong partners for these rural and smaller communities.
“104 communities are really open to business and are quite interested in collaboration,” she said. “What has been a real highlight of what Scugog First Nations has with our municipal partners is we ended up collaborating quite a bit on local projects we found valuable together. I think if we could promote that type of collaboration between First Nations and their local surrounding communities, that would do a lot for better relations and stretch a dollar farther.”
