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The Rural Voice, 1999-06, Page 8HRYSLER • DODGE • JEEP • CHRYSLER • DODGE • JEEP • CHRYSLER • DODGE • JEEP • CHRYSLER • DODGE • JEEP • RYS ER • DODGE CHRYSLER DODGE JEEP 1999 Neons Only 3 left 0% Financing 1999 Stratus Demo Fully Equipped 0% Financing "We only sell the best for less and wholesale the rest" CHRYSLER DODGE JEEP DODGE TRUCKS If you don't see what you want, ask us, we'll find it for you. Sunset Strip, Owen Sound Ontario, N4K 5W9 (519) 371 -JEEP (5337) 1-800-263-9579 Fax: (519) 371-5559 4 THE RURAL VOICE Keith Roulston Draining our dollars Someone once compared a community to a bucket. If the bucket leaks, all the water drains away until the bucket is empty. If a community leaks its money away, it too will soon be empty. Every time there is a techno- logical change, it seems to increase the leakage of rural dollas to urban areas. The so-called information age is a case in point. Fifteen or 20 years ago Harrowsmith magazine heralded the information age as making possible the rebirth of rural communities. The reasoning was that when jobs were being done on computers and computers could be hooked to telephone lines, people should be able to live anywhere they wanted. I doubted the optimism at the time and, as I look around now, I see that I was, unfortunately, right. Certainly there's potential for these technological advances to help rural communities and if they don't, to a certain extent we rural people are to blame for not taking advantage of the opportunities presented. But the driving forces in our society, big corporations and big governments, are already entrenched in the cities and they are likely to adopt any technology in a manner that reinforces the business model they've already developed. Take the automatic teller. There will no doubt be new jobs created because of automatic tellers but most of those jobs will be in bank headquarters while most of the jobs cut will be the smiling teller at your local branch (who might be your neighbour). Banks are also promoting the use of computerized banking, bypassing your local branch altogether. Recently when we deposited an unusually large amount of money in Where will off farm. jobs come from? our account, we got a call a few days later from some investment "expert" at a bank office far above our local branch level, offering to help invest the money. It used to be that advice would have been given (if we had asked for it) by local branch staff. Insurance companies also want you to deal directly with them, cutting out the local agents. OMAFRA's restructuring has cut jobs at the local county office level while keeping people at OMAFRA headquarters to provide information through a website. It used to be ordering a parcel through Sears meant going to your local office and talked to a real person you knew. Now you phone a central order desk, meaning Tess of your purchase's value goes into the local economy and more to a city. And this trend is just beginning. There are predictions that in future, for instance, you won't go to your local car dealer to buy a new car. You'll go on the internet and fill in the specifics of what you want and your car will be delivered to you directly from the company. It will be the same with many other goods and sery ices. All this means that many of the jobs currently on main street of your town or village will be eliminated. Already the arrival of big box stores have killed many of the retail jobs in small independent stores on main street. That follows a trend that sees fewer and larger farm equipment dealers and feed mills. The natural trend for feed companies and packers is toward franchise farming, where contracts are signed with producers to buy feed directly from the company and send their animals to a large central packing.plant, creating fewer and fewer local jobs. In the U.S., the low returns from this kind of farming have resulted in farmers having to take off -farm jobs to support their farm operation. But if the current trends continue, where will our farm families find off -farm jobs?0 Keith Roulston is editor and publisher of The Rural Voice. He lives near Blyth, ON.