Canada’s leading experts on rural areas are warning that policy makers have been neglecting rural issues, which in turn is having negative consequences for the economy and smaller communities.
The warning comes in a groundbreaking report produced by the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation and the Rural Policy Learning Commons and presented recently at a conference on rural communities in Prince Edward Island.
“We realized on one level that this has never really been done before,” says Sean Markey, associate professor with the School of Resource and Environmental Management and a co-editor of the report.
“It is an important issue to talk about.”
Titled “The State of Rural Canada 2015,” the report says that rural Canada, which is vital to the nation’s economy, is largely being ignored.
“We have been neglecting rural places and permitting an erosion of their important community development base,” the report says.
“We have forgotten how to re-invest in rural and small town places, preferring instead to simply run down the capital invested by previous generations, and view infrastructure renewal simply as line item costs that we ‘can’t afford.’”
