Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age
of Globalization, Jennifer Sumner, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2005, pp. viii, 179.As we are continually reminded, Canada is now an overwhelmingly urban
country. Mythic vastness notwithstanding, most of its people and certainly
its mobile “creative class,” presumed driver of the knowledge
economy, live in major cities, whose policy requirements have captured a
good deal of national attention in the past decade. By contrast, rural
Canada has been reduced to the status of the space in-between. Its
resource-based communities and livelihoods—farming, fishing,
forestry—live with the downward price pressures of global commodity
trade as well as the most intractable trade disruptions. Its public
services and social infrastructure have been diminished. Aside from pretty
places that have become recreational or residential enclaves, its
population typically is declining and aging. Its widespread sense of
abandonment so far has generated only inchoate, perhaps incoherent
political responses. Meanwhile, the growing consensus among newspaper
editorialists and think-tank policy specialists is that
“dependent” and “unsustainable” rural Canada has
been subsidized long enough for sentimental reasons at the expense of real
needs elsewhere.
Education and the Civil Commons