Depopulation is a policy choice

On the prairies, it's a bit unremarkable to say "we are losing our rural communities". The hollowing out of rural life has been a lament for more than a generation, even if it's largely ignored in urban Canada. I cut my teeth in the film industry working on Hallmark movies-of-the-week, which recycle the same urbanite-comes-back-to-the-country-and-finds-love plot every week. The plot is a fantasy, and its appeal is a testament to how long the problem has been with us.

It's time to start saying "we have lost our rural communities". I visited a farm with an address in Laura, Saskatchewan. Laura was a village, with a grain elevator, a school, a community hall, and houses. When I passed through, only two buildings were still standing. The village is gone; nobody lives there. There are probably hundreds more that have disappeared.

Depopulation is just as evident driving through the dirt range roads that form the transportation grid of the great plains. The fields are still cultivated (mostly), but there's nary a soul that lives there. There are no farmhouses, and the farmers who tend the fields and pastures only show up occasionally in their trucks or farm equipment. I had to drive 20km from the highway to visit Dogs Run Farm, and, despite it being in the heart of farm country in Manitoba, I don't think I saw a single building on the whole stretch. There were precious few buildings on the highway either.

Originally, there would have been a farmstead on every quarter, or every half-mile. So that 20km stretch would have originally been home to 25 farm families or so. Now, nobody lives there.

The settlement of the prairies was a policy choice. The policy was The National Policy, which was John A. MacDonald's nation-building policy to convert the great plains into farmland that could grow food to support eastern Canada and the British Empire. The farmers who settled there were intended to be a market for eastern industry, and a bulwark against American expansion.

The policy of populating the plains gradually petered out over a century, and by 1970, the Federal Task Force on Agriculture delivered a report titled Canadian Agriculture in the Seventies that explicitly recommended that the farm population should be reduced, that younger farmers should leave farming, and that smaller, non-viable farms should be abandoned. Government policy shifted from actively supporting the farm population to a laissez-faire approach that abandoned farmers to the market.

One result of that laissez-faire policy has been depopulation. Laura, Saskatchewan no longer exists because the government switched from a policy that supported settlement to one of benign neglect.

I think it's fair to ask whether this policy still serves Canada as a nation. Control of the farmland in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta has been abandoned to the market and the ever-shrinking number of farmers who have stubbornly chosen to stay. Vast amounts of land are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. Those hands do not live on the land, and because they are absent as landholders, they have no incentive to take care of the land or to care what happens to it beyond the narrow requirements of producing a crop.

The current federal agricultural policy measures success in terms of exports. Commodities (wheat, canola, cattle) are sold in great quantity internationally, which translates into more than $100 billion in GDP. This is considered a great policy success in making Canada wealthier. That most of that wealth stays concentrated in an ever-shrinking number of pockets is not considered.

The concentration of land ownership will continue if we keep the current laissez-faire policy. If we want to become a nation of vast feudal estates, we can hold course and keep our current policy. If we don't want that, we need a new policy. And the question becomes: what policy should that be?

Off the top, it needs to be provincial policy. The plains were settled as part of a federal policy before Saskatchewan and Alberta were provinces, and before Manitoba reached its current extent. The responsibility for land use and land tenure is now squarely a provincial one.

Jurisdiction aside, we have a huge urban population that is struggling to afford housing and a huge amount of land that could house those people if it wasn't concentrated in a small number of hands. In addition, a large portion of that land is held by elderly farmers who don't have succession plans. If we don't change our policy, land ownership will continue to consolidate, and we will continue to lose our rural communities.

We need a policy for land succession that puts that land in the hands of young families. The land needs to be subdivided so that the population is dense enough to support small villages and towns again. It needs to be affordable to those who are just starting out, who don't have to have prior wealth to afford it. In short, we need a resettlement policy.

And, while we're at it, we need a policy that corrects some of the flaws of the historical National Policy. The policy should respect the numbered treaties with the first nations and seek reconciliation for the ways that those treaties were violated. It should incentivize residents to care for the land, and not just treat it as a resource, asset, or commodity. It should encourage some amount of re-wilding that makes room for wildlife and native plains. It should encourage diverse uses of land rather than being a vast monoculture of cropland. Above all, ownership shouldn't be concentrated in a small number of hands.

The key to this policy is succession. There is a huge amount of farmland that is about to change hands. If we continue laissez-faire and simply allow our existing inheritance and estate laws to govern the process, the land will be sold and ownership will continue to concentrate.

This is where we need new policy: By and large, the current landholders are elderly, cash-poor, land-rich, and heavily indebted. Our policy needs to address all three of those: It needs to ensure that the elderly farmers aren't destitute when they die, it needs to ensure that the land gets subdivided and redistributed so that ownership doesn't continue to concentrate, and the debts need to be discharged without sinking the banks that hold them.

This takes courage. Messing with inheritance and debt forgiveness is not for the faint of heart. I can imagine the whole process getting stuck in a bureaucracy of legal and financial proceedings. But I can also imagine a policy that encourages our elders to invest in the next generation by passing the land forward. I've seen it happen. Our policy simply needs to encourage the parental instinct to provide for our children. It needs to invest in our future instead of mortgaging it.