The Rural Voice, 1991-03, Page 10o.. a .,...,.w Dew. ems M d.
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
RURALCOMMUNITY SHOULD
LEARN TO CO-OPERATE AGAIN
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and past publisher of
The Rural Voice.
It's easy to get depressed about the
future of the rural way of life these
days. Whether you're looking at
farming or the dangers posed to the
rural communities we depend on, the
future can seem bleak.
Rural Canada seems under attack
from the most powerful forces in the
land. It's only a matter of time before
all our post offices are made into retail
postal franchises in the back of
somebody's store. Our national oil
company has declared it doesn't want
franchises that pump under a million
litres of gasoline a year, which means
the company you own will disappear
from most small centres.
I suspect neither big government
nor big business would really cry at
the loss of small-town Canada. Like
the government's push to county
instead of local school boards, or the
provincial Conservatives' push for
regional government in the mid 1970s
and the Liberals' recent push for re-
structured county governments, the
bureaucrats know it's easier to deal
with fewer, larger units than with
many small ones. No doubt there
were many in the federal govemment
who would have been delighted dur-
ing the imposition of GST, if the
country had been run by 10 giant cor-
porations each with a department to
study the implications and application
of the new tax, rather than 100,000
little businesses stumbling through.
It works the other way too. A
small food processor I once knew
claimed the big companies were quite
happy to see tough new packaging or
labeling regulations come through, be-
cause they knew they could cope with
them while many small competitors
would be forced out of business.
But what can we do?
Last month I talked about W.C.
Good, the first president of the United
Farmers Co-operative (now UCO) and
a federal Member of Parliament for
the Progressive Party elected in 1921.
But in 1925, Good quit politics,
convinced he couldn't accomplish as
much for farmers inside Parliament as
he could through the co-operative
movement. Early in the century,
farmers and rural people felt the same
kind of frustrations we feel today.
While they made up a larger part of
the population and had more political
clout (the United Farmers of Ontario
formed a government in 1919) they
still felt helpless.
For them, the answer was in the
co-operative movement. They started
local Co-ops and the UCO. They had
co-operative cheese and butter factor-
ies. They started credit unions, and,
out west, the wheat pool. Faced with
a challenge, they turned to their past.
They saw the pioneer history that
when a family couldn't do something
on its own, neighbours and friends
banded together in barn raisings and
threshing and quilting bees. The
solution was to work together.
Somewhere we've lost that pioneer
spirit. We've gotten, in a way, fat and
lazy. We sit back and expect govem-
ment or business to provide solutions
and jobs. We have abdicated control
of our own lives and the lives of our
communities. We're so caught up in
the myth of the individual, we forget
the individual can only do so much.
Like the farmers of early in the
century, however, we need to remem-
ber there's more than one way to skin
a cat. Working together we can bring
the capital, ideas, and expertise togeth-
er to provide the kind of services we
need in rural communities. We can
seize back the control of our own lives
by finding the middle path between
the extremes of letting the individual
carry the load at one end and expect-
ing government or big business to do
it at the other. We simply need to
leam from our history and put our
imaginations to work.0