Major changes in Prairie operations has led to dying towns
The following submission was received in response to the Yahoo small towns series. It has been edited for clarity.
I love your articles on the problems we face in Canada as rural residents. In the Princeton, British Columbia area we have several defunct or destroyed towns.
The Town of Copper Mountain no longer exists but a large mine occupies the site. Allenby, another community south of Princeton, was destroyed once the smelter here closed. Granite City is but a collection of rotting logs where once a strong mining town grew. Coalmont is a crippled village 20 km. to the West, a remnant of a vital coal mining town. Hedley, twenty kilometers to the East, is losing population rapidly and even Princeton lost 400 of its 3000 citizens in the last census. Blakeburn, a village on the top of the mountain near Coalmont, is now only a graveyard and driveways to lost homes. Brookmere, about 40 km to the west, is a remnant of a beautiful community with an old railway water tower, caboose but no longer has a railway. People worked hard to create these communities, build homes, and raise families but now their work and families are long gone and the bones of their homes are slowly deteriorating.
The reasons for lost prairie towns are somewhat different than those in British Columbia where we have a boom and bust resource-based economy. Mines close and their supporting towns die.
Agriculture on the prairies has evolved from small, mixed farming operations to large single product units. This industry creates a continuous flow of product into the system, unlike mining, and this creates a flow of revenue into government coffers. The governments tend to centralize their operations in large cities, and of course these require wealth to operate. This wealth is transferred from the huge rural agricultural areas into the cities to maintain life in them.
Property tax, income tax, fuel tax, and sales taxes on equipment paid by rural operators should be retained in rural areas to maintain the quality of life in those rural areas, but it
is not. School closures force rural people to either move or send their children on grueling, long bus commutes to get an education. Artificially-controlled pricing on agricultural production, and the diversity of rural agricultural operators continually pressures the industry to rationalize and reduce the labor costs involved. Fewer people are then required to produce an equivalent volume of output.
The cost of this process is directly felt in terms of Canadian employment. When once proud North American industrialists produced machinery for farms, the income transfer from agricultural-based labor to local manufacturing industry had little effect on the North American Gross National Product. In recent past this manufacturing is no longer done on this continent.
Major amalgamations in industry producing agricultural equipment have generated a global profit based ethic. Ford agricultural equipment was purchased by New Holland Manufacturing. Case and International Harvestor, once strong individual companies, amalgamated. Fiat then purchased both Ford/New Holland and Case International. John Deere purchased Caterpillar, and it's not uncommon to see Mitsubishi and Yanmar engines in their equipment. Farmers purchase their equipment from these sources, and the effect of this is that when once we employed people in rural areas directly, now we employ people in foreign countries and rural communities are failing.
Doesn't sound like great economic planning to me. And economic planning is not rocket science. In the 60s I studied economics at the University of Alberta. Plenty of information existed then, and recently I checked to see if the books I studied on Industrial Organization still existed. Surprise – Industrial Organization, Theory and Practises by Joan Woodard is still being sold, along with over 600 other books on the same subject. These books identify what a well-organized and properly developed country should have for economic structure.
The identifier that is relevant to the topic here is that a properly developed nation should aim for equal distribution of industry, population, and wealth over the geographic area of that country. Is it any news, folks, that we have NOT gone in that direction? So what do we have government for?
I sincerely hope that we can collectively be wise enough to go in the right direction in the future!
W. Stephen Brodie
Princeton, BC
