2004 National Rural Conference
Taking Action for Sustainable Rural Communities

Red Deer, Alberta
October 21-23, 2004

TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH BY GAIL SURKAN,
FORMER MAYOR OF RED DEER,
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2004

Thank you, Chairman Frank McMahon, and with a special acknowledgment to Wayne Easter, my colleague in public service to Canadian communities, it's my very special treat to join you this morning.

There may be a number of you who weren't here last night when I had the opportunity to say "welcome to our community". I want to take this opportunity to ensure that you know how welcome you are here in Red Deer, central Alberta.

We have a community of which we are very proud and which we love to share, but we are always most enthused when we are sharing it with people like yourselves who hold the same motives, the same imperatives, the same perspective on our future as rural communities and as a nation. I think today we are in very, very fine company as this conference launches in our community, and people who have at their heart the same very important values as our own, gather to share perspectives and to push out the boundaries of our current thinking.

This morning I've heard some very powerful concepts introduced to the floor of this convention and I want to explore some of them further. They are concepts which are, perhaps, less tangible than those articulated in your workbook or even in the language we use everyday as we tease out the important factors behind "community development", but they are very powerful. They come back to our most basic understanding of the word "community".

I heard our moderator, Frank McMahon, say that the essence of rural communities is "quality people living in quality relationships". What a powerful concept, but how unlike the words we normally use to describe communities, community issues and community futures.

I've also heard Wayne Easter talk about our communities as the "absolute front line" in advancing not just Canada's economic goals, but its social goals. These thoughts are absolutely pivotal to the work that we do together. But are we really clear on what is meaningful about these concepts and how they might guide us as we work from the conceptual to practical?

I'd like to explore this with you. My job today is to reflect on the challenges we face from the perspective of the community itself, and to challenge our thinking on the most effective ways to meet those challenges. As I do that, I'm going to ask you to share a journey with me which stretches beyond the conversation we most often have when we talk about rural development and the future of rural communities.

Let me begin by asking you why rural development and the future of rural communities are so important to us? Of course, we grew up in these communities; we have a very serious emotional attachment to them. We understand that they represent an historical settlement pattern which has helped this country grow and develop. Naturally, we think they should be preserved.

But why is there such gut rumbling caused by the thought of losing our rural communities? We know we are increasingly urban. We know that jobs and opportunities, services and amenities are concentrating in our metropolitan areas and that increasingly, that trend is carrying us towards a settlement pattern typical of developed countries everywhere. Why are we fighting what seems to be so inevitable?

Why is rural development suddenly so important to governments? Why, as Wayne Easter noted, has rural development become such a priority that governments are actually sitting down and talking to one another about rural development issues and what might be done about them? Why is this on their radar?

And why are "rural communities" acquiring such a focus in that discussion? Traditionally, when we've discussed rural development our focus has been on rural industry and rural economy, not rural community. But the language is changing and increasingly, the discussion centres on the future of our rural communities, in and of themselves. Why do you suppose this is happening?

Most of us think of rural development, and traditionally we have always dealt with rural development, as a consequence of change in our rural economy. We are aware of the fundamental changes impacting agriculture, the fisheries and forestry - some of the key components of our rural economy in Canada. We're very aware of and we focus on the overwhelming consequences of powerful, world-wide trends such as market globalization, technological change and consolidation in agricultural and forestry industries.

In the course of that discussion, we recognize the inevitable impact that these global trends are having on our communities and we mourn the loss of something familiar - the places where we grew up, the historical settlement pattern with which we are familiar. These are our roots and we talk nostalgically about how important our rural, cultural roots are to our character. Still, I believe we don't fully understand why this loss of "rural community" causes us such angst.

There's often a sense of the inevitable - that we are fighting a wave of technological change, of trans-generational settlement change that will be very, very difficult to turn back. We develop policies and programs to deal with the predicted consequences and we come together to search for ways of putting these into practical action. We speak of, and we plan for, the changes that we need in our rural industry to cope with this global tide.

And so we have policies for agriculture and policies for forestry and policies for fishing, but we struggle to know how to adequately address the human side of this unsettling and seemingly inevitable course of change. And yet, intuitively we know that so much of what is troubling us really boils down to this very basic scale.

We all sense loss but it's hard to put our finger on what that loss is and why it unnerves us so. It's hard to galvanize around the human issues associated with change in our rural environment because we can't yet practically describe what "beast" we're trying to slay.

Practically we know that there are many social issues connected with change in our rural economy. Some we can identify and these become the focus of our thinking and our actions. We talk about and count the losses in job opportunities, income and education levels, health status and sustainable rural infrastructure.

Still, intuitively, we know that the real challenge we face as our rural communities decline runs much deeper than just these losses. There is a greater sense of loss unnerving us here. It is running deeply in our collective gut and we are beginning to feel the sense of urgency around it.

Let me put the proposition to you. I believe what we are sensing here in Canada (and I'm sure we are not different than other developed countries which are losing their rural settlements), is not so much the loss of the rural economy or the historic settlement patterns that are so familiar to us. It is the loss of our essential relationships - "quality people living in quality relationships".

Many of us talk about the loss of our relationship to the land or to the sea - something that has been historical in our families and our communities and is important to our identity. We talk about the loss of our relationship to our historical roots and our culture. We know that those things are important to the way we view life and the way we raise our children and the way we organize and do things together.

Sometimes, though perhaps not often enough, we talk about the loss of our relationships to one another and the environments and circumstances that sustain those relationships - quality people living in quality relationships. We're not sure; we can't quite articulate what troubles us here, but we sense that something is changing and we are uncomfortable.

I believe we are sensing, with the loss of our rural communities, not just the loss of familiar places - the villages and towns and sometimes even small cities where we grew up - but the loss of "community" per se; that is, the ability to live together in a values-driven environment that gives us a very strong sense of belonging, of human scale and human importance. It's a deeper loss. It's harder to deal with. It's harder to articulate and it's certainly harder to know what to do about it. I want to come back to that.

Ultimately, it is the loss of human scale in our life which troubles us so. What does that really mean? It is the loss of living and working environments which give us a sense of belonging, of having importance and influence where we live and work, where our participation is not only noticed but is absolutely pivotal to the outcome.

Most of us grew up in communities where we had a sense of our own place in the bigger picture. We had a sense of human connectedness. We were important to the outcome. We participated. We were engaged. We belonged. I believe we grieve for the loss of this 'sense of place" intuitively and powerfully in our gut, and it is perhaps one of our most compelling concerns as we face the loss of our rural communities. And yet, we haven't learned to articulate it or to deal with it.

We sense that global trends are pushing us into systems and spaces - urban spaces particularly - which somehow lack that essential human connectedness and we are very troubled. We see tangible evidence of this loss in rural areas as they depopulate and we respond by trying to protect the physical places - the place names, the assemblies of houses and businesses - and we somehow identify these as the important nucleus of our concern.

We fight the loss of our schools and hospitals. We push government to be more aggressive in fanning out economic opportunity. We sometimes stubbornly compete with our neighbours for what little investment opportunity or employment opportunity seems available. We are competitive, we are angry, we are frustrated and we are pushing government to do something about it. And often we are, I think, missing the point.

We talk of the need for improved infrastructure, better training and education, more venture capital, ongoing leadership development - all of the things that you will talk about again over these next two days; all of the things that are compellingly important to the structures of good economies and healthy living and working environments. Still we aren't talking about the most essential ingredient - the human ingredient.

And so we have to understand "community" at a much deeper level than just its physical form to understand its importance and to design for its survival. We have to understand our communities as essential living environments where people feel a sense of "shared future", where they have influence, where they work together to build common value systems. And then we will find more effective and elegant ways to support the process of community development and sustainability. It reaches well beyond infrastructure, training or new job opportunities.

There is hope. There is very powerful hope when you observe the settlement patterns which are now beginning to emerge in Canada and in other countries like our own. Yes, there is rapid urbanization, but in many places a new pattern is forming which bears watching and understanding.

For example, in some rapidly urbanizing environments, the healthiest and most quickly growing communities are not the urban cores of large metropolitan areas. They are in the rings of smaller communities surrounding those metropolitan areas. I'm not talking about suburbs - places that grow up as single purpose residential enclaves which send their citizens into the city to work and then invite them back home into a relatively isolated residential environment at day's end.

I'm talking about communities that are growing up within circles of urban economic influence, but are growing up as whole and independent communities with very powerful identities of their own. They have strong economic ties and supply relationships to metropolitan centres, but they are not suburbs. They are, in fact, rural communities thriving within the powerful economic environments created by large urban centres, but growing independently because of their ability to provide quality, human-scale, social living environments for people.

There are other trends that give us hope. One of them you'll see in the growth of regional economies and the regional networks of communities that support them. When you analyze what attracts industry to an area now, you'll find that its decision makers are not looking to locate their enterprise in communities. They are looking to locate in regional economies with strong supply chains that can provide the labour and resources they need. And so, astute communities are banding together into well coordinated regional networks which can offer the resources needed by footloose industry. The kinds of relationships that are emerging and the kinds of communities which are thriving within those regional economies tell us something compellingly important about the perspectives and behaviours which may be critical to the survival of rural communities.

They also tell us that we can adapt to change, even in the face of compelling global trends; that we can find new ways to preserve that essential contribution of smaller, more rural communities as "human scale" environments where people can continue to find a sense of connectedness and relevance.

By now you may be thinking that while all of this is interesting, it does little to help us meet the practical, everyday challenges that we face as we take our communities forward and fight for their survival. Let's talk about that.

There is much that we can do in rural communities to respond to this process of change and to take a direct hand in shaping our future. Many of the important and familiar concepts and tools are captured very ably in your conference workbook and they are important. We need to advance them. As Wayne Easter has said, they represent a more conscious level of effort on the part of all levels of government in dialogue with rural communities.

Some solutions may require us to change long held habits. If in fact we need to provide more effective services at the community level and we don't have the critical mass needed; if we need greater scale or sophistication in services; then we must find ways of grouping together as communities to share resources and to provide services through networks of communities

If we need more innovative ways to meet the needs of our families and businesses then we must push harder to take advantage of new technologies and practices such as improved communications infrastructure, distance learning and preventative health strategies, and micro-production technologies that allow us to manufacture and process things efficiently on a much smaller scale.

But let's not forget one of our most important jobs - and that is to nurture those relationships which are so fundamental to the value we provide. This is a less tangible but absolutely critical job, and the interesting thing is, it doesn't fall to a level of government. It falls to the community to do the most powerful and important work in this area - the construction and nurturing of inclusive, interactive, supportive social environments built on a foundation of shared values.

Let's talk a little about those value systems. For example, rural communities have always been inclusive, but they have been also largely homogeneous. For several generations they have not been challenged to deal with social and cultural diversity. And yet, the future of our rural communities will depend on our ability to embrace diversity - to be inclusive of many cultures, languages and values that may not be familiar to us.

Somewhere in your program, you will talk about the importance of immigration to rural communities. If immigration is a part of our future (and I hope it is!), the values that we develop around inclusiveness and respect for diversity will be amongst our most powerful economic and social development tools. And yet, I suggest, these are values we are not currently working very hard to build.

Rural communities and rural people are generally cooperative, rather than adversarial. Many of us, especially here in the west, are only one generation away from a time when we gathered together to raise each other's barns, or to share in the building of the first place of worship in our community, or pooled our resources to support those that were less fortunate in our midst. But for many of us those tools of collaboration, cooperativeness and mutual support are growing rusty. These are important value sets that underscore the historical uniqueness of rural communities, but they take work to build.

Rural communities have traditionally practiced participative decision-making. We make decisions together. People engage. People feel a sense of influence and importance. But we are increasingly influenced by systems which encourage us to pass responsibility to government or to non-government agencies or just generally, to somebody else. We have to guard against the weakening of participative decision making and shared accountability in our rural communities. These are also important contributors to our tool kit.

A history of depending on one another has helped us build a sense of trust as the foundation for living and working together in communities. In the past, much of what we have accomplished has depended on our ability to trust one another. Trust is a remarkable enabler. It allows us to take risks and recover from setbacks. It underscores the understanding that we are all in this together and that our future is shared at a community level. We need to talk more often about the behaviours that build trust in a community. We need to actively practice them.

So I think there is a call to action for rural communities to preserve and nurture the values which are so uniquely and historically theirs and to accept the challenge of embracing new values, such as a respect for diversity, which will provide the inclusive, participative social environment people crave so deeply. Much will depend on our practical ability and our willingness to put our values into action - to model and teach them and to utilize them as the guiding principles in all that we do together.

I'll give you one small example of something that we've learned here, in central Alberta, about behaving according to our values. It isn't necessarily unique. You may find it similar to initiatives within your own regions. What is interesting to me is the learning that took place as the communities of central Alberta learned to work together and the understanding we developed of the importance of our values to our survival.

We have an organization called the Central Alberta Economic Partnership. It is comprised of 45 communities in central Alberta which banded together originally to work on economic development strategies - the typical things, shared marketing, training, recruitment programs and so on. It is an eclectic group of communities - some big, such as the City of Red Deer, some very small. Some have emerging urban economies and some remain entirely dependant on rural industry. Some are close to the Highway 2 corridor - the fastest growing economic corridor in Canada. Then, there are those that are very remote from the corridor and struggle to understand how they'll benefit from that economic whirlwind. There are those that are growing and prospering. There are others that can see no prospect for growth.

Originally a small group of communities came together to share some simple tasks. Others joined. The Province of Alberta lent its support. As participants we learned we could do many practical things together, but we also learned something more fundamental. We discovered that in order to advance the future of central Alberta and protect the communities of central Alberta, we had to learn to trust one another. We had to move from competitive behaviour which caused each of us to focus exclusively on our own benefit regardless of what the cost might be to the adjoining community, to collaborative behaviour based on an ability to see our future as being shared. It meant trusting and sharing in an entirely new way.

That trust became a powerful enabler. Once the members of this eclectic group learned to share resources and decision-making; once they grasped the idea of a shared future; once they developed trust - they found they had a foundation for resolving issues and problem solving on many different fronts. For example, they confronted the issue of potential water shortages in central Alberta within the next generation.

We've always assumed that water would be abundant in Alberta. And yet, we have learned that given some of the climatic changes and water use practices in our province, we are likely facing a significant shortage of water in all regions of Alberta south of Edmonton within the next 15 years. Water and the protection of watersheds and river basins is suddenly a very riveting priority.

Because, as a community, we had come to understand the importance of working together, we quickly coalesced around this issue, also. We formed a common front to press the Alberta government to change its attitude along with its policies and regulations related to water conservation and use. And so the trust that has developed as we have worked together has given us a stronger voice to advocate for our future at a much different level and in a much more powerful way.

Now I want to leave you with a challenge. It is a call to action as you work together over these next two days. The concepts explored in your conference workbook are important and deserve our continued energy and all the attention that can be mustered at all three levels of government. But there is work beyond this to do within our own communities. It is the work of identifying and building on those most essential values that will maintain our contribution "on the front line" in advancing Canada's economic and social goals.

We have the ability to lead, to demonstrate, to model the most important value set in our collective Canadian conscience. This, more than anything, will compel Canadians to understand and to protect the future of rural communities.

Good luck. I wish you, in the work that you do here today, the wisdom that you will need to identify the important steps which must be taken to protect our rural communities and to build their future. I wish you the energy, the perseverance and the sheer gut-rumbling risk taking needed to put those things into practice when you go back into your home environments. I wish you the opportunity to continue to work and learn together and to provide the leadership that is needed to carry our rural communities into the future in the compelling way that they deserve to go.

Thank you for being here in Red Deer. It's wonderful to share this passion for rural communities with you. I look forward to the work that you will do together. Thank you for the investment that you make not only as you represent your communities and your organizations, but as passionate individuals in our great Canadian rural collective.

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