Challenges facing rural communities: a Newfoundland and Labrador perspective.

• Author: Fitzgerald, Roger

Some of the challenges undermining the strength of our rural communities flow from deliberate interventions in the economy over the years by governments at all levels. If governments have created many of the conditions that damage rural sustainability and viability, they also have the power and the obligation to intervene in ways that strengthen these communities and enable them to survive and thrive in the modern world. This article argues that rural communities have an indispensable role to play in the economy, and there is nothing natural about letting them die.

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The city of St. John's is a wonderful community and Newfoundland's largest urban centre. With a population creeping towards 200,000 it is fairly small by North American standards, yet huge in the provincial context. About two of every five people live on the northeast Avalon. The region is like a magnet, drawing people from our rural communities into the city with its wealth of opportunities.

But St. John's is not the place to go if you want to see firsthand the challenges facing our rural communities. You have to come to places like the Bonavista Peninsula. It is the place John Cabot made landfall in 1497 on his vessel The Matthew which, he reported, was slowed down by the massive schools of fish reaching far out from our coasts. From the 1490s to the 1990s, the Bonavista Peninsula prospered from the bounty of one of the richest fishing grounds on the entire planet. But in the early nineties, when the Government of Canada imposed a moratorium on cod fishing in the face of drastically depleted stocks, the Bonavista Peninsula's circumstances changed, as did the circumstances of hundreds of other communities throughout Newfoundland and Labrador. The district of Bonavista South, with an entire population of approximately 13,000 endured the loss of over 2000 jobs in the fish processing sector alone.

In St. John's the official unemployment rate as reported by Statistics Canada is around 10 per cent. In my region, the official rate is double that; and in some communities in my district, the unemployment rate is above 80 per cent. And remember that those official rates do not include the people who have given up searching for jobs they know do not exist or those who have moved away in search of opportunities they cannot find at home. Many have moved to St. John's. Many others have left our province altogether. Since the early nineties, Newfoundland and Labrador has lost over 10 per cent of its population.

Some may ask why not just let the trend continue? Why prop up rural economies when opportunities exist in our growing urban centres? Why not let our rural communities die a natural death?

The economist, E.F. Schumacher, penned the famous work entitled Small is Beautiful. He wrote about ways and means to strengthen the small community and make it viable. He wrote about the limitations that we all know too well, but he also wrote about the opportunities that too often are missed. He said: "Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it." This perspective means a lot to me as a resident of a rural community and as a Newfoundland and Labrador parliamentarian.

It is no accident that we have hundreds of communities dotting the shores along Newfoundland and Labrador's coasts and rivers. The fish brought most of our ancestors here, but nature threw every manner of adversity up against the settlers to make life interesting--wars, disease, storms, famine, abject poverty, you name it. Only the stubborn could survive here, so not surprisingly, stubbornness has become a mark of character in these parts. And it may therefore be tempting to think many people remain in our rural communities simply because they are too stubborn to make a better choice.

But I would put it another way. People whose families have survived here for generations are too stubborn to believe that the opportunities to sustain our communities have all...