{"id":100588,"date":"2025-04-08T10:56:47","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T14:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=100588"},"modified":"2025-04-08T16:54:54","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T20:54:54","slug":"opinion-sarah-patricia-breen-heather-hall-kyle-rich-and-ryan-gibson-discuss-the-importance-of-rural-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2025\/04\/opinion-sarah-patricia-breen-heather-hall-kyle-rich-and-ryan-gibson-discuss-the-importance-of-rural-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Sarah-Patricia Breen, Heather Hall, Kyle Rich and Ryan Gibson discuss the importance of rural Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Sarah-Patricia Breen, Adjunct Professor in the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development; Heather Hall, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development; Kyle Rich, Associate Professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Brock University; and Ryan Gibson, Associate Professor and Libro Professor of Regional Economic Development at the University of Guelph, originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The 2025 federal election is characterized\u00a0by anxiety, primarily driven by the actions and economic consequences of United States President Donald Trump\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0tariffs\u00a0and\u00a0threats to Canadian sovereignty\u00a0continue, it is little wonder why\u00a0election promises\u00a0have so far focused on jobs, tax breaks, infrastructure reinvestment, trade and military spending.<\/p>\n

While sovereignty and rising costs of food, energy and critical minerals are key election issues, rural Canada has not been the focus of any of the major political parties.<\/p>\n

The importance of rural Canada<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rural Canada is home to roughly one in five Canadians. It\u2019s also home to the vast majority of the Canadian land base, including watersheds and food sheds \u2014 geographical areas that supply food to the population \u2014 as well as energy sources, critical minerals and forests.<\/p>\n

As Canada faces increasing economic uncertainty, rural areas will play a critical role in supplying essential resources. Ensuring they benefit from this role requires strong place- and evidence-based rural development programs and policies from the federal government, whoever leads it after April 28.<\/p>\n

Significant challenges \u2014 from trade wars to climate change \u2014 impact every community across Canada. However, what this looks like and how this is felt on the ground is different across rural Canada. All too often government policies and programs fail rural citizens and communities in one of two ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. They don\u2019t account for the impact of rural Canada. This means policies and programs fail to consider how rural realities can interfere with their intended implementation.<\/li>\n
  2. They don\u2019t account for the impact of policies and programs\u00a0on\u00a0rural Canada. These failures are the unintended impacts that \u201cplace-blind\u201d policies and programs have on rural communities.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Creating regional disparities<\/strong><\/p>\n

    These policy failures are driven by an urban bias in federal policies and programs. This bias is a result of\u00a0limited or obscured rural data\u00a0and the concentration of policy and decision-makers in Ottawa. These policy failures contribute to larger problems, like Canada\u2019s growing issue with\u00a0regional disparities, often along rural-urban lines.<\/p>\n

    This is\u00a0nothing new.<\/p>\n

    Rural Canada has a long history of being misunderstood and poorly represented in federal policy. Past and current federal efforts to include rural Canada in policymaking have been sporadic or uneven.<\/p>\n

    A national\u00a0Rural Secretariat\u00a0was established in 1996, and a \u201crural lens\u201d was established in 1998. Both had the express purpose of providing leadership and co-ordination related to rural and remote areas within the federal government. These programs were then\u00a0dismantled by the former Conservative government\u00a0in 2013.<\/p>\n

    In 2019, the Liberal government established\u00a0Canada\u2019s first minister of rural economic development. Alongside this came a\u00a0strategy for rural Canada, new tools to incorporate rural considerations and the\u00a0Centre for Rural Economic Development, which included regionally located rural advisers.<\/p>\n

    However, as of 2025, these efforts have been weakened or ignored. The minister for rural economic development is now the minister of agriculture and agri-food and rural economic development. The Centre for Rural Economic Development \u2014 now housed in a separate ministry from the minister \u2014 has quietly ended its regional rural adviser program.<\/p>\n

    The risks of a sector-based focus<\/strong><\/p>\n

    These examples illustrate the ongoing uncertainty of how realities of rural Canada are integrated \u2014 or not \u2014 into federal policies and programs. Rural Canada is often lumped in with a particular sector, including agriculture or natural resources. The de facto rural policy then becomes sector-focused.<\/p>\n

    This is a problem, because rural communities often have little or no power over resource development decisions and are largely at the mercy of companies that can\u00a0simply pack up and leave.<\/p>\n

    A sector-based approach also ignores the multiple, complex and integrated needs and opportunities across rural places. The\u00a02024 State of Rural Canada\u00a0illustrates this complexity of rural issues. It offers recommendations to policymakers, one of which is the development of a comprehensive, cross-sectoral strategy that recognizes the diversity of rural Canada and provides a framework for co-ordinated action.<\/p>\n

    The need to shift to integrated, place-based approaches over sector-based is echoed in findings from research conducted\u00a0both in Canada\u00a0and internationally.<\/p>\n

    Based on our research across rural Canada, we support these findings. We also support the\u00a0recent statement\u00a0by the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation, which calls on the federal government to implement the following actions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Revitalize the rural lens;<\/li>\n
    2. Strengthen the Centre for Rural Development;<\/li>\n
    3. Deliver rural development in rural Canada for rural Canada.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      No vision?<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Rural Canada is vital to the future of Canada. It is critical that all political parties campaigning for the federal election have a platform that meaningfully includes rural Canada \u2014 and refrain from focusing only on sectors that operate in rural Canada.<\/p>\n

      The Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation recently released a list of questions that people can pose to their potential member of Parliament.<\/p>\n

      No. 1 on this list is:\u00a0\u201cWhat is your party\u2019s vision for rural and northern Canada?\u201d\u00a0And yet few of the parties are answering or tackling that question during the ongoing election campaign.<\/p>\n

      \"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Sarah-Patricia Breen, Adjunct Professor in the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Design and Rural Development; Heather Hall, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development; Kyle Rich, Associate Professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Brock University; and Ryan Gibson, Associate Professor and Libro Professor of Regional Economic Development at the University of Guelph, recently published a piece in The Conversation about why rural Canada should be a focus in the federal election. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":100601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,6],"tags":[28,3602,7488,5207,8269,83,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100588"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100602,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100588\/revisions\/100602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}