Digby Neck- from the Ottawa Citizen

Goodbye, Small Town, North America


Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
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Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.

An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.

"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"

The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.

Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.

"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.

Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.

Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.

And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.

Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.

The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.

"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.

This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.

Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.

Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.

Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.

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