Exurban myths
How our rural identity is sucking the life out of cities
BY Anna Bowness
Photography by Andrew Penner
It might be Anne Shirleys fault. She has been hoisted up so high in our cultural imagination that shes almost on our flag; we cant help but identify with her even if weve never seen a lighthouse and dont know what a gable is. Her story is our story; it is the ur-story, it is the story of the Canadian experience, and we tell it to ourselves and to our visitors, over and over and over.
Oh, the bleak maritime rocks; the crags, the cod, the salt air, the reliably eccentric locals: every one of us who can read (or, indeed, rent a movie) has an intimate understanding of these things. And every one of us who can read or rent a movie or watch TV, or get books out of the libraryhas an intimate understanding of lonely prairie vistas, of the desolate calm of a grain elevator at sunset. We are Canadian: we know wheat fields and coal mines like the back of our hard-working hands. These things are our cultural legacy, and we inherit them unquestioningly.
But why, when far more of us live in condos than have ever caught a fish, is our cultural imagination so littered with Newfie fishermen? And are those mythical images responsible for the fact that policy and funding privileges are skewed to favour rural Canada over urban Canada? Its a fact that almost as many people take the TTC in one day as live in all the Maritime provinces combined, yet government money disappears outside the city limits, leaving urbanites to huddle in slush while their undernourished infrastructure pokes along.
Torontos transit system, for example, has been languishing for years despite pleas and an obvious need for funding from the provincial and federal governments. This years federal budget has, at last, allocated $1.3 billion for the TTC. But its too little and too late for a system burdened with the responsibility of shunting a million and a half people around each day. And the figure is small when compared with farm subsidies conferred on rural Canada every year.
The recently released 2006 census data shows what anyone whos been squished into a streetcar or elevator lately already knows: a lot of Canadians are living in cities. Of the 31.6 million people in Canada, four out of five live in an urban centre. That means that there are just over six million people living the agrarian existenceor the windswept, or the salty or the permafrost existencethat we tend to think of when we think of Canada. The rest of usmore than 25 millionarent.
The citizens are congregating in the cities, but the money isnt, and neither is the voting power. Rural votes count for more than urban ones, as some city ridings represent more than 100,000 voters while certain rural ridingsthose in northern Canada and the Atlantic provinces in particularrepresent as little as 25,000 voters. The last federal election, which gave us a Tory leader in spite of the fact that a total of zero Tory seats were won in any of Canadas three biggest cities, raises the eyebrow of the urbanite a little higher.
Why, when far, far more of us live squeezed together and piled on top of each other in cities, is so much privilege conferred on the spaced-out and increasingly depopulated countryside? It doesnt make sense, unless you consider that Canada, as an idea, is still very much a hinterland. It doesnt matter that thousands of people immigrate every year to Scarberian highrises and Edmontonian condos, and it doesnt matter that most Canadians will always feel cement, not tundra, underfoot. We are trapped inside our collective cultural imagination, unable to escape the Tom Thomson Jack pines in our heads. We continue to let this outmoded identity define us, and its working against us in the strangest and most insidious ways.
Urban Canada is suffering in real ways from the overestimation of the rural in our arts and culture, but what can we do? We can internalize the urban mythologies that our artists are giving us, and let them implant themselves in our minds, so that when we close our eyes and think of Canada, we can see its cities on the imaginary horizon.
