Michael Ignatieff
Sun
Canada is the most successful and enduring multinational, multilingual liberal democratic federation on Earth.
The paradox of our identity is that our divisions are a source of strength, not weakness.
We have built a common life of equal citizenship among peoples who speak different languages and who come from different cultures. We are among the most equal countries in the world. We are among the richest.
Yet hope and opportunity are not equally shared in Canada. There are regions of our country where hope is in short supply, and where opportunity is fleeing to the cities. The growing divide between urban and rural Canada, between Canada’s metropolitan areas and her regions is the great undiscussed national unity challenge of our time.
About 70 per cent of Canadians live in just six cities; 30 per cent live in farming communities, single-industry towns, fishing communities and aboriginal settlements.
In many of these communities, there is anxiety. The local population is aging. The tax base is eroding. It is hard to attract and retain doctors and nurses.
The young people want to stay, but they are forced to leave for the city, because that is where the jobs are. Local manufacturers are hanging on: If the dollar increases further, they may go under.
On the farms, record indebtedness and declining incomes forces families to work at other jobs to make ends meet. On aboriginal reserves, there is sometimes despair.
We don’t call this a national unity issue, but we should. We do not want a Canada where hope has fled our regions to the big cities. We do not want any region of our country, north or south, east or west, to be left behind.
We have spent the past 40 years working to ensure that no Canadian is denied health care on account of income. We now have health outcomes dependent on where in the country you live. If there’s two-tiered health care in this country, it’s not between rich and poor. It’s been urban and rural. This is unacceptable.
Improving education in Canada’s regions and in the north is the key to economic development outside Canada’s major metropolitan areas. This is crucial if young Canadians are to remain where they grew up and to create new opportunities for their children.
We need to build on success: On the development of wind power in Matane, and the new jobs it brings; on the potential for our farmers to develop new biofuels and biopharmaceuticals; on the capacity of our forest industries to develop new products for the housing market; on the capacity of rural communities to become telemarketing and call centres; on the willingness of our medical schools to train doctors and nurses for service in the regions.
There are regional development strategies that work. In Kamloops, partnerships between municipal government, the local university and the Kamloops Indian band have brought new opportunity to the city and its region; in Sydney, the Cape Breton Development Corp. has invested in call centres and software development companies, and a city has survived the closure of its steel mill and coal mine.
The development strategies that work are ones that are created at the grassroots, by partnerships between all orders of government, local business leaders, community organizers and local stakeholders.
The federal government can become the national clearing house of best practice in regional economic development policy.
It should provide national infrastructure to assist regions to grow, and it should bankroll research in environmental and technological innovation that creates jobs and opportunities. It should sustain income and price supports for farmers and fishermen, and to fight for fairer conditions of trade against our heavily subsidized partners.
We need a national food policy, to bring consumers, producers and processors together to coordinate strategies for reviving Canada’s ocean regions and our agricultural sector.
Farmers, fishermen, forestry workers need to know they have a friend in the federal government of Canada.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
