By James MacMaster
The just-before-Christmas National Post headline, Rural Canada in Crisis was an eye-catcher, if for no other reason than the word “rural” so seldom graces any of the cover sheets of our major dailies. A Senate Committee had just released an interim report on rural poverty and, in my capacity as a rural Realtor, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the real thing, because the column featured commentary from such luminaries on-all-things-rural as Senator Hugh Segal, and National Anti-Poverty Organization President Debbie Frost; so I just knew that the final result was guaranteed to be seriously entertaining, something along the lines of “Debbie and Hugh do Dundas County”, coming soon to a township near you!
I was not to be disappointed. The finished product featured input from a long list of people, each one offering their own particular version of the crisis. For some it was the unfairness of off-farm employment, for others it was the distance from first-rate medical facilities or low commodity prices that constituted the calamity. Although the diagnoses were varied, there was a common theme to the touted prescriptions: government programs and other state interventions were immediately necessary to rescue what was left of our rural hinterland.
And that’s a lot like prescribing a double-dose of viral pneumonia for the bronchitis sufferer or blood-thinners for the hemophiliac. Because “The” malady that is eating away at rural Canada is government growth and intervention, yet it is quite apparent that Segal and Frost et al propose to cure the problem by prescribing more of the same.
There are two aspects of government growth that contribute to the rural decline. There is the actual physical growth of the agencies themselves – the numbers of employees, which increases the tax burden on everyone, rural poor included. And this type of growth depends upon the other type: the growth of influence, which presents as the development of new regulations, which allow governments to acquire land by a process that amounts to sanctioned confiscation.
The report scrupulously avoids any suggestion that regulatory overload is playing any part in the destruction of rural Canada, despite the fact that the press and media diligently churn out examples on a daily basis. For example, it accurately notes that the impact of sawmill closures is devastating for rural residents and local economies but incongruously attributes the shutdowns to “the consequences of border disputes and competition from emerging economies.” Yet during the past three or four years, within a 100 mile radius of the Peace Tower, a dozen small sawmill operators were forced to close, not because of lack of market, but because they couldn’t afford the cost of undertaking environmental impact studies: test holes must be drilled in mill yards to prove to provincial environment officials that their sawdust piles (wood in one of its many organic forms) do not constitute an environmental threat.
In the Post article, Senator Hughie decried the depopulation of our rural areas, but, whether due to blissful ignorance or willful blindness, failed to identify legislative culprits such as Ontario’s Provincial Policy Statement on Land Use (PPS) which “focuses growth within settlement areas and away from significant or sensitive resources and areas which may pose a risk to public health and safety.” Want a plain version translation? “We’re going to make you country-folk move to the towns and cities by prohibiting development (defined as doing anything to your land) in rural areas and protecting your property by regulation.”
A short list of the areas where development is prohibited includes: areas adjacent to ground and surface water reservoirs and tributaries; mature forests; wildlife habitat; connecting zones; areas containing gravel, sand or limestone; and – just in case anything was missed by that wide net – areas where agricultural land predominates. Why, once you successively lay the coloured transparencies on the map of rural Ontario, there’s scarcely enough white space left to sink a posthole. Depopulation indeed…by Deed.
The PPS meshes seamlessly with a multitude of other acts and regulations – with counterparts being churned out by presses in all provincial capitals – ostensibly designed to save us from ourselves. The various salvations produce regulatory side-effects that many rural property owners simply can not afford to live with, and a ubiquitous byproduct that invariably accrues benefits to governments or their funded agencies as control passes from private to public domain: land and resources. The ministries that concern themselves with safety in a variety of guises (food, drinking water, public health, but not crime on the streets) or any issues connected to the environment and conservation have been given carte blanche clout and credit to quick-step the regulatory march. And we all know that legislation directed toward food production, water sources and the great outdoors doesn’t affect anybody in Rockliffe Park or Rosedale to the same extent as it would, say, a beef farmer in Olds, Alta. or a sawmill owner in Renfrew, Ont.
As the regulatory tide eats away at notions of freehold, rural property values decline with every restriction – and none of the acts mention one word about compensating landowners for their losses. As an example, a farm family I know has the misfortune to have a small river running across their 200-acre property. This stream feeds into a lake, which supplies the local town with drinking water.
Because of the do-nothing-within-zones mandated by Ontario’s Clean Water Act, they will lose the use of 22 acres (more than 20 per cent) of their farmland, and they will not receive one red cent in compensation for loss of use, loss of future income or loss of market value. And when you think of all the swamps, drainage ditches, streams, rivers and lakes that eventually contribute water to a municipal drinking water system, well, you get the picture.
The impacts on the rural real estate industry are quite predictable: lower land values and less development.
The Senate’s interim report professes faith in rural Canada’s resilience, but no great degree of prescience is required to divine what the final product might look like. The writing on the wall is there for all to see, rural real estate practitioners included.
“The Committee also wants to insist on its deep faith in rural Canada’s ability to develop its own solutions to its own problems with the appropriate (italics mine) support from government. The Committee also wants to insist that it believes urban Canada needs rural Canada not just for its food, its wood, its minerals or its fish, but also for its environmental stewardship, its watersheds and, ultimately, its open and forested spaces.”
So there it is, in black and white. The Senate Committee is about to resume hearings, so the question for all rural residents – real estate practitioners included – is this: “Just what are we going to do about that?”
James MacMaster is a salesperson with Rickerd Realty in North Glengarry, Ont. and the past vice-president of the Ontario Landowners, a rural property rights advocacy organization with 16,000 family memberships across Ontario. Email
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