Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization

Extract

Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization, Jennifer Sumner, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. viii, 179.

As we are continually reminded, Canada is now an overwhelmingly urban country. Mythic vastness notwithstanding, most of its people and certainly its mobile “creative class,” presumed driver of the knowledge economy, live in major cities, whose policy requirements have captured a good deal of national attention in the past decade. By contrast, rural Canada has been reduced to the status of the space in-between. Its resource-based communities and livelihoods—farming, fishing, forestry—live with the downward price pressures of global commodity trade as well as the most intractable trade disruptions. Its public services and social infrastructure have been diminished. Aside from pretty places that have become recreational or residential enclaves, its population typically is declining and aging. Its widespread sense of abandonment so far has generated only inchoate, perhaps incoherent political responses. Meanwhile, the growing consensus among newspaper editorialists and think-tank policy specialists is that “dependent” and “unsustainable” rural Canada has been subsidized long enough for sentimental reasons at the expense of real needs elsewhere.