By Councilor Tim Belch
We are fighting a war in our own backyard and I’m afraid we’re losing the battle!
What war you say? I don’t see any war! Well, it’s insidious and it’s happening on a global scale. The war I speak of is the Rural vs. Urban war.
Here in Ontario, the sad reality is many small towns are in crisis and are at risk of slowly fading away.
I recently attended a fascinating talk, titled “Winning the 21st Century, how small cities and rural places can get beyond survival mode”. It was held in Peterborough and was hosted by COIN (Community Opportunity and Innovation Network) as part of their inaugural Innovation Talks series, sponsored by Nexicom. The keynote speaker was Dr. Ken Coates, a Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dr. Coates laid out numerous examples of how we are in the middle of a global economic transformation. 200,000 people per day are moving from rural areas into big cities. We’re looking at an unprecedented pace of urbanization. One half the world’s population is urban and it’s accelerating, not decelerating!
Coates points out that the “technological revolution is moving faster than we ever expected. If you add the growth of Asia, which has eviscerated the manufacturing capacity in North America, you realize we’re in the middle of some huge transformations.”
Governments at all levels are struggling because no one seems to know what the next stage is, says Coates.
Looking at Canada, Coates suggests we have every reason to be worried as we’re moving into a City-State economy. He explained there will be 8 economies made up of the major cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary for example. They will drive the entire economy and he suggests we’re almost there!
What you’re left with is all other cities and areas that are viable, serve one of two functions. They either provide raw materials (Fort McMurray), or they provide recreational opportunities for people to get away (The Kawarthas).
Dr. Coates suggests many small communities even here in Ontario will fail, but suggested the “Peterborough area does have a lot going for it. You have a deep history and your downtown has character” – sounds like Millbrook to me.
So, what do we need to do? Coates offered up many action items; here are a couple:
“Firstly, you have to have an organization that is committed to innovation, committed to forward looking thinking and creating an ideas platform.” I’m happy to say that a couple of members of council and township staff subscribe to this outlook.
In seeking solutions, he offered this advice: “do not try to become a consensus based process. Consensus doesn’t produce anything very interesting. It just produces consensus, so it makes you feel better. You have to be able to work fast, get people’s input and move along quickly”, said Coates.
Dr.Coates also suggested that as an area we need to be “creative not imitative. Too many towns go around and borrow what other places do. You have to do what’s good for Cavan Monaghan, and that’s going to be different from other places.”
If my grandfather Nathaniel Belch, who lived on the 6th line of Cavan, were alive today, I always envisioned he would pass along this advice,”don’t be led by problems, be led by vision”!
