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Effective rural policy is critical to Canada’s security, stability and sovereignty
Decades of rural neglect have created national vulnerabilities. Securing Canada’s future depends on strengthening communities beyond our cities. (Photo by Wikimedia, Public Domain)
Canadians are increasingly anxious about the impacts and implications of overlapping crises. These include catastrophes like fires, floods and hurricanes brought on by climate change, growing economic disparity and increasingly violent rhetoric at home and abroad. There are also threats to our sovereignty and economy coming from our closest neighbour to the south. Policymakers and the public are seeking ways to protect ourselves and survive this period of polycrisis.
Many of the biggest threats to — and opportunities for supporting — our sovereignty, security and stability can be found in rural and remote places. It’s far past time for Canadian governments to get serious about robust rural policy that secures infrastructure, resources and social cohesion by addressing three critical issues:
- Canada’s chronic failure to sufficiently invest in rural infrastructure has left our country vulnerable socially, economically and geographically.
- Deeply entrenched “strip it and ship it” approaches to resource extraction have led to uneven development and economies in which a few stakeholders benefit while entire communities suffer the consequences of decisions made by largely outside actors.
- Centralized social and economic forces in urban centres have created power imbalances. Geographic narcissism has fostered stereotypes of rural and remote regions as inherently disadvantaged, irrelevant or backward. This has produced fissures in social cohesion and provided fertile ground for populism.
These failures are not new. Strategies for correcting them are well-documented and supported across rural research and rural extension practices. Those suggesting that Canada devise a contemporary version of past U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s must bear in mind that his plan was heavily based on rural extension and investments in development.
Unfortunately, federal and provincial governments have ignored, under-supported or actively disinvested in rural infrastructure, including internet, roads, clean water, energy, hospitals and schools.
Current tensions with the United States have led Ontario Premier Doug Ford to cancel a contract with tech titan Elon Musk’s Starlink that was intended to provide broadband services to rural and remote parts of the province. Nothing meaningful has been suggested as a replacement to address service gaps that persist despite 40 years of policy statements on rural connectivity.
This has left many communities physically and virtually disconnected from their neighbours and the rest of the country. Communities are exceptionally vulnerable if there are no local or regional health care or other critical services, if they can’t safely travel to those amenities or lack access to timely and accurate information online or otherwise.
Your postal code should not determine your quality of life. What’s needed is policymaking that recognizes how supporting the right to be rural is critical to ensuring national security, socioeconomic stability and productive solidarity across communities of all sizes and types.
Rural and remote regions are where our country’s prime resources are located — fresh water, critical minerals, lumber, agriculture, oil and natural gas and everything in between. This reality has largely produced policies that treat these regions as “resource banks” that generate revenue to fund infrastructure and services everywhere except where the resources are mined, drilled for, cut down or grown.
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This has hollowed out our rural and remote regions, and those who still live there have become increasingly resentful and distrustful of government and industry. Who will be there to steward, develop or defend these communities should U.S. President Donald Trump act on his covetous intentions? It is exceptionally easy for aggressors to take advantage of disenfranchised people and poor or insufficient infrastructure.
It is easy for certain critical issues to fly under the radar in times of uncertainty and rapidly changing geopolitics. Some have suggested that Trump could go after Canadians’ health data, housed on the servers of companies in the U.S., as a means of exploiting potential vulnerabilities. It is important to note that our agricultural information is equally, if not more, vulnerable.
Canada has no legislation specific to agricultural data. Development of “smart” farming — from GIS-driven crop management to robotic dairy operations – has coincided with consolidation in the agribusiness sector that has resulted in a small number of companies controlling the market. They have amassed vast amounts of data about weather, production, biosecurity and physical geography. With little to no intervention to ensure that data belongs to producers and is kept in Canada, we do not have any effective means to govern its use. Worse, we have no way of knowing who might have access to it and for what reason.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown, taking over a country’s digital infrastructure is as devasting as bombing buildings. Little or no oversight of agricultural data is a glaring threat to both digital and physical national security. Good governance of agricultural data is vital to supporting food production and to ensuring sensitive information about a country’s physical geography and bio-environmental vulnerabilities are protected.
Socioeconomics and policymaking have been centralized in cities so it is not surprising that such a vulnerability has gone unaddressed. This has happened at the same time that international free trade deals and technology have rapidly reshaped what we do, where, and how we do it.
But rural decline is not an inevitable consequence of globalization, but rather of political ignorance and neglect. The challenges faced by most rural and remote regions mirror those of their urban counterparts and include housing, food security, health care, cost of living, the opioid crisis and increasing economic disparity.
However, policy choices that use per-capita formulas favour large populations. Rural regions also suffer from decisions that assume smaller communities are “cities in waiting.”
As well, some politicians and policymakers use stereotypes to characterize rural people as backward or irrelevant or both. This diminishes their inherent right to pursue their specific needs or goals — and fails to recognize the critical value of rural places to our shared futures. Strategists have used this dynamic to polarize urban-rural populations and successfully foster what political scientist and author Katherine Cramer calls rural resentment.
Rural and urban Canadians are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent, but rural regions have become vulnerable to the combined forces of “news deserts” and forces that benefit from polarization. Add to this that Canada faces an increasingly destabilized relationship with our closest trading partner. Canadians will need to unite and work together on socioeconomic issues to survive attacks from outside our border.
A 2024 report on the state of rural Canada argued that we require a serious national strategy that integrates rural perspectives into broader social and economic policies. All orders of government have struggled for decades to accomplish this goal. Now that Canadians are increasingly united against external threats, we have an opportunity to address this long-standing challenge, but we must do so seriously and with urgency.
This simply cannot and will not be achieved until policymakers and political leaders meaningfully address the value and vulnerabilities of rural realities. We must invest in rural infrastructure, recognize the importance of rural regions to our economy and cauterize any festering resentment. Only when we enable smaller communities to thrive will Canada as a whole be able to ensure its current and future survival.
This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
