What's killing rural Canada - Macleans.ca

Kathy Jones is pretty confident there are 100 people living in Jansen, Sask., today. Maybe it’s 101.

If you’ve visited one rural town, the saying goes, you’ve visited one rural town—no two are the same in their virtues or flaws. But visit a few in Canada these days—communities of, say, 10,000 or less, ones that lie far from our thriving urban centres—and it becomes clear the struggles are piling up.

Adds Bill Reimer, a professor emeritus at Concordia University and one of the country’s leading experts on rural issues: “There’s a tendency in media to say it’s a crisis situation. In my mind, this is a slow burn.”It’s 10 a.m. on a summer weekday in Kamsack, Sask., and foot traffic is starting to multiply on Third Avenue.

The opioid crisis soon led to an HIV outbreak in the region. For comparison’s sake, a 2016 Saskatchewan health report found the provincial HIV rate at about 14 cases per 100,000 people; on the First Nations reserves near Kamsack, that figure was 117 cases per 100,000 people—and growing. “They have help-wanted signs and I have professional experience, but that didn’t help,” says Tracy Cote, a middle-aged local from the Keeseekoose First Nation. She says she lost two sisters to drugs but stayed clean herself. Still, it took years to land a job at the local Prairie Grain Bakery; she credits her boyfriend, who works there, for helping. Wanda Cote, who manages the New Beginnings Outreach Centre, is blunter in her assessment of Kamsack: “This town is very racist,” she says.

The latter is a scenario inhabitants of Grandview, Man., pop. 1,482, are desperate to head off. During a town gathering last year, a chorus of boos rained down on the region’s Progressive Conservative MLA Brad Michaleski as he defended the government’s plan to overhaul the provincial ambulance system, which would result in the closure of Grandview’s EMS station. The move “really riled people up,” says Jim Rae, one of three physicians in town. “The hydro office is now gone.

Few disparities set less-populous parts of the country apart from cities more than the crime gap. Last year, the rate of police-reported offences in rural Canada was 30 per cent higher than in urban areas, according to Statistics Canada data. And while rural police forces nationwide serve 17 per cent of Canada’s total population, they handle 24 per cent of the country’s police-reported crime.

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