Village Squire, 1973-05, Page 18Canada is developing a
new social minority ... the
Canadians who live in small
towns.
This isn't surprising, for
ever since the Second World
War, social scientists, jour-
nalists, politicians and
spokesmen for Big Business
have been lauding the
growth of Canada's cities
and the trend away from
rural living.
There's no denying there has
been such a trend. In 1901, most
Canadians — 63 per cent —
lived on farms or in unincor-
porated hamlets. Most of the
others lived in small villages or
towns that served as trade
centres for the surrounding
regions. There were only a few
big cities in Canada.
But by 1971. 76.1 per cent of
Canadians were classified as
urban dwellers. The rural pro-
portion. according to Statistics
Canada's definition of rural, was
only 23.9 per cent.
And the trend is supposed to
continue. It has been estimated
that Canada's population by the
year 2,000 will be 80 per cent
urban, with half the total popu-
lation concentrated in nine giant
metropolitan centres; Montreal
with 5.4 million people, Toronto
with 4.5 million, Vancouver with
2 million, Edmonton, Winnipeg
and Ottawa with 1 million each,
Calgary and Hamilton with
900,000 each, and Quebec City
with 800.000.
So our legislators concern
themselves with the problems of
the big city, and draft massive —
and expensive — programs for
urban redevelopment, urban
transportation, control of urban'
pollution, urban unemployment,
turban poverty, urban crime, and
even urban alienation — the lone-
liness and lack of a feeling of
belonging that are said to beset
modern man because he lives in
the big city. And so often these
are shared -cost programs, avail-
able only to those municipalities
with a big enough tax base to pay
the municipal contribution that
becomes, in effect, a deterrent
fee, eliminating the smaller muni-
cipalities.
Even education is geared to-
wards the larger community, with
the stress on larger schools with
more complex facilities. The uni-
versities arc located mostly in
large centres, giving the city
dweller the advantage of not
having to send his university -age
children to another centre and
pay board for them there. In On-
tario, there was a tremendous
growth of community colleges.
• It had been hoped some would
be built in smaller communities,
and that they would offer the first
two years of university. Instead,
they became terminal schools,
and the universities successfully
lobbied the provincial government
to keep the community colleges
from giving university credit
courses.
No wonder, with all this atten-
tion on the city and its problems,
people who live in small towns
are beginning to share some of the
feelings of other neglected social
minorities: the aged, the pen-
sioners and the native people.
But is Canada an urban coun-
try? Is it made up mainly of rural
people? Or is this image of Canada
as a country of city dwellers just
a myth?
One contemporary sociologist
says it is just a fairy tale. Rex A.
Lucas of the University of To-
ronto says this idea is just a myth
and that it has been perpetrated
by social scientists for years.
Lucas reached his conclusion
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