Posted on 12/06/2016 9:41:06 AM PST by SouthernerFromTheNorth
Here's why rural Ontario is fading and cities aren't
The urban-rural divide is swiftly becoming one of the most pressing issues of economic policy in this century. From Europe to England to the United States and yes, here in Canada, the sweeping changes to physical landscapes have translated to sweeping changes in political landscapes.
As David Reevely pointed out last week, Ontario’s urban centres have seen economic growth and recovery that the stretches of rural land separating those centres simply haven’t. There are multiple reasons for this, one being that Ontario’s municipalities have been practising a policy of intensification for years now. That policy encourages people to live in cities where there is work, in part to preserve existing farmland and protected lands outside urban centres. Intensification is an answer to ugly and wasteful suburban sprawl, and a response to the flight of young people out of the suburban and rural areas and into cities.
This policy of intensification comes at a time when rural life is growing less and less attractive. Certainly the cost of land and living is low, which should be enough to keep some young people in the area. But most of the jobs that guarantee a living wage can no longer be obtained without a university degree, and even workers with graduate degrees are forced to reckon with the corporate preference for no-strings-attached contract workers, and the vagaries of the “gig economy.” We cannot tell our young people that in order to succeed they must be educated, then complain when they leave home for that education.
On the other hand, characterizing this divide as the fight between “Liberalville and Toryland” sounds catchy, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Cities don’t win the presence of major employers because they’re socially or democratically liberal. They win major employers because they’re better places to live, and better places to live tend to be socially progressive.
This August, Toronto was ranked the fourth most liveable city in the world. (This, despite its decrepit subway system and its history of carding and other odious practices.) Are the executives at major firms really going to tell some of their most valuable employees that they’re moving locations to a less expensive area where they might be the only visible minority in a crowd? Or where they might not find a Pride event? This has nothing to do with who is in power, and everything to do with longstanding local culture.
That said, the urban-rural divide in Ontario is just as important and as dangerous as the urban-rural divide that doomed England to Brexit, and created the opening for Donald Trump in the U.S. More resources must be allocated to including people from all walks of life in Canadian prosperity.
That includes refugees from Syria, and it also includes the people in the rural reaches whose jobs have been automated away. It’s terrible that Ontario said no to green energy this year. Those jobs could have made significant changes to the way of life in rural Ontario – building and maintaining windmills and solar panels is a strategy that would save jobs and the environment.
Madeline Ashby is a strategic foresight consultant and novelist living in Toronto. Find her at madelineashby.com or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.
Right. It’s not a decision that is made on an individual basis, but the city only exists because there are advantages of scale there.
I'm not sure I agree with that. When you factor in the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure in rural areas to serve small populations, this equation may tip heavily the other way.
Urban concentrations arose due to trade advantages that led to employment opportunities, drawing people to fill the jobs. Then came the parasitic policies. It’s exactly like fleas on a dog, or banks being robbed because that’s where the money is.
Why? Because the laundered Chinese money pouring into Toronto real property market
For all you geology/geography fans out there, you just described the Canadian Shield, the part of Canada that was covered in glaciers in the last major Ice Age. (All of Ontario, most of Quebec and the Labrador part of Newfoundland are in the Canadian Shield.) Indeed, you can see the from the air the demarcation between the maximum extent of the glaciers and fertile farmland in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Indeed, the farmland south of the Canadian Shield in the provinces I mentioned are some of the richest farmland in the world when it comes to growing staple grain crops.
What costs less in a city? An economies of scale graph is a curve, not a line, and has an optimum, beyond which costs go up.
The optimum population density on a number of measures is around 400 people per square mile, not 400,000.
The electoral system is almost exactly the same as UK system. It is called unofficially "First Past the Post" system. Your comment very topical, because the newly elected Liberal Party have "sworn" to end it. Possibly for proportional representation. Big debates going on now.
Canadians vote locally for a candidate of a political party. That winning party has already picked out a leader. A small meeting of a few hundred members decides who leads. If that party wins the general election- that leader gets to be Prime Minister. He or she has only to win election only in their own district. I have never been able to vote for or against a Prime Minister elect in 60 years of voting.
I think that the author has no abikity to create things of value, so therefore must live in a liberal envirinment where others can pay her to produce verbal drivel and she can imagine that she is a productive member of society.
It might pain her to realize that the garbage collectors pruduce more value for city dwellers than she does.
Triple bypass surgery, to give just one example.
Put together a list of things that you can't even buy outside a metropolitan area to understand the underlying point here.
Yes, yes.
Ability and produce.
Hate finger typing on an iPad.
The whole article screams of Agenda 21 and the author has no idea what Agenda 21 is. Green Acres is a better environment for human species as well as the other animals.
For very small populations, you are correct that it is not economical anywhere in the world. You can simply look at the total cost of something to determine fairly accurately how much total energy was consumed by it. There's no escaping that cost is ultimately a reflection of total energy consumption. It's very easy to determine by the higher cost that electric cars are currently less green than traditional designs. That organic apple at the grocery is more expensive because a lot of other apples were lost in production and more total energy was wasted. Almost always higher cost means more energy was consumed somewhere in its lifecycle, and more pollution was generated.
Think of a town located next to an interstate highway. The highway helps facilitate the cost-efficient transportation of products to the town, but the residents of that town could never afford to pay the cost of building the highway themselves.
Amazon.com delivers everywhere in a day or two and their inventory dwarfs the selection and prices of big city stores.
Medical costs have been driven to insane levels by too many lawyers and politicians. Typically the CEOs of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers are lawyers, not doctors. They have to be.
Amazon delivers very little of their own product. UPS and FedEx deliver for them, and those businesses are built entirely on economies of scale.
I agree with your point about medical costs, but there's no doubt that hospitals in rural areas wouldn't offer specialized treatments and procedures because they don't have the volume of business they would need to justify the cost of building the facilities and buying the equipment.
When a Torontonian explains things, that’s when the confusion begins.
There is a certain level of inbred thinking to assume that the inability to go to a “gay pride” event would impact anyone’s choice to live anywhere.
I have gone on fishing trips near Red Lake, Ontario which is about 1200 miles to the northwest of Toronto. The main businesses are gold mining, lumber, and fishing resorts. There is not much else going on. The people in that part of Canada have more in common with the the people of Winnipeg, Manitoba which is a few hours to the west.
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