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4 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Trickle-down rural economics
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
A few years ago we had a chance
to take a break for a couple of days at
a relative's cottage in eastern Ontario.
The cottage. owned like most are
by urban residents, was new and
luxurious. The village nearby.
however. went beyond the term
"quaint" to being a sad remnant of an
earlier era. There was raw beauty in
the setting with Targe mill ponds that
had once provided the power for grist
and saw mills that now sat empty and
deteriorating but the downtown shops
were a shabby reminder of better
days when the village had been a
self-supporting service centre for the
surrounding countryside.
The problem for this village was
that the lake was small enough that.
despite the fact the cottages were
getting newer and grander. there
weren't enough cottage owners to
keep the town going.
The village is not representative
of many of the tourist areas of
Ontario. In fact in areas like Muskoka
and Kawartha Lakes, it often seems
to a farm observer that the poorer the
farm land, the richer the towns and
villages seem to be. The summer
influx of cottagers with their
abundant time and money, provides
more revenue for local shop owners
in many of these communities than
does the 12 -months spending of farm
families in areas blessed with top-
quality farmland.
The lesson seems be that there's
more money in providing a lake with
a good view and an opportunity for
swimming and boating than
providing food that's essential for
life. Call it the trickle-down theory
put to work in the rural economy. If
you can attract enough urban people
to spend some of their disposable
income for a few months each
summer it's better than having rural
residents spending their money 12
months a year. Theoretically, the
richer the urbanites, the more money
will fall from their pockets into rural
hands.
The cost of lakefront property in
popular cottage areas continues to
escalate. In part this is natural
because there is a limited amount of
lakefront within easy driving distance
of the big urban areas so the price
gets bid up. What's remarkable is that
there are enough people with enough
disposable income to bid up these Tots
and cottages when it's only their
second home. Add in the fact that in
many cases people tear down the
cottages on many Tots so they can
build something grander and the
wealth of this country's urbanites
becomes truly amazing.
Farmers, on the other hand, sell
something that, unlike Lakeshore lots,
is not finite. No matter how many
people we import into this country,
the amount of food always exceeds
the demand, bringing low prices.
Farm incomes have fallen steadily,
relative to urban incomes, since there
were half as many people in Canada
as there are today. The efficiency of
farmers in producing ever-growing
amounts of food has helped urbanites
use their increasing income for things
other than food, such as cottages.
The only areas where farmers
have managed to match their urban
cousins at all have been commodities
where surpluses have been limited by
controlling supply. Even in the
supply -managed commodities like
milk, eggs, chicken and turkeys, the
trend to fewer larger farms has
continued but more slowly.
Elsewhere the solution to stagnant
prices and higher costs has always
been to produce more on the land
you've got, then go out and buy more
land. More production means
urbanites can spend increasingly
more of their money on leisure
whether trips or cottages.
The only hope for businesses in
rural towns and villages across
Ontario, is that urbanites will spend
enough money in their leisure hours
to keep their community going as the
farmers disappear.0