Nora, you won't remember this but for the first 2 years of your life, you and I started every day with a walk around Rainy River (pop.1000), stopping at the post office, the grocery store (one of 2), and the drug store. You were born at the hospital, and got all your checkups and vaccinations at the clinic. We also had a bank, a nice clothing shop, a furniture and hardware store, 7 churches,, laundromat, and hair salon. The stores were staffed by townspeople and going for our walk was life-saving for this young mother. It was a good community.
Thanks for this description of what Rainy River used to be. I now live in the country west of Thunder Bay and have driven through Rainy River many times on the way to and from Manitoba. When I do, I always wonder about its past given that it now seems to be largely a husk of what used to exist, with few people around, permanently closed businesses, and old, decaying houses.
As a council member for a community that wasn’t mentioned in that CBC article but has been covered a lot by CBC because we have one of the ERs with the most closures in the province, thank you for writing this. The loss of jobs that follows closures - hospitals, schools, factories, is the slow decline of our towns. And as we try to stem that we are fooled into the “growth is good” mindset and pursue things for this growth, all while wondering, can we actually ever get there? When I pull the thread long enough, there’s nothing on the end and then what? I hadn’t seen this CBC article but it’s the kind of piece that infuriates me and makes me feel like we have to at least try for something else.
Lots to think about here. My hometown ("the Onion Capital of Canada") has no grocery store (but the variety store has produce now), bank, or gas station. The gas station and grocery store that were there went out of business (at least in part) due to racism. Hospitals are at least a 40 minute drive.
Small town or small city? I spent 8 years in a small town, 1,600 people about 40 minutes from Saskatoon. That’s a small town. At that time anyway it had most services except medical facilities.
Timmins is a small city and it’s on the northern edge of you will. There isn’t much north of there so it really should be pretty well serviced but it will never be as well serviced as Sudbury or cities further south. There looks to be more focus on defending the north and that should benefit places like Timmins.
Just over 20 years ago I was offered a job in Timmins and couldn’t afford to turn it down. Fortunately for me they switched the position to Sudbury which was much closer to the places I wanted to go and easier to relocate out of. Had it not been for that opportunity I’d have gone back to Fort McMurray another city on the northern edge. I had worked in Fort McMurray for a year previously and it seemed to have at least one of everything possibly aided by a very high average income.
Most Canadians have no idea about these places but they generate a lot of revenue for the country and are important for our national security.
The economies of scale thesis is definitely right, but there's also other, insidious processes contributing to the fall of rural towns. Places like Timmins have billions of dollars of rare and base earth minerals under them. And while mining work has become better paid and has better health and safety than most mines in the world, and certainly most mines throughout history, the central problem is that all of the profits from the mines are being siphoned off. Take Glencore, for example, which operates in Timmins. 20% of the profits are sent to a Swiss national, and former CEO, and Qatar. Glencore is one of the largest companies in the world, with billions in profits each year.
Imagine the mines were operated by people who live in Timmins, owned by the people in the town, and the profits were instead used to build infrastructure and solve the myriad problems the city faces (not to mention, building a self sustaining indigenous economy to support first nations).
Marx imagined that the productive capacity of the industrial revolution could, if given to the people, allow us to choose our work or spend time in leisure, because we'd have more than enough. It would mean that not every single human experience would need to be commodified and sold. It would mean we would produce things for consumption and not profit. So even though you would still be able to buy cheap apples, because we produce just so much of them, you'd have enough free time to build an orchard and grow local apples yourself. You wouldn't be competing with inexpensive apples, because you wouldn't need to sell them. Moreover, because humans would become so productive, we could factor in all the necessary social considerations into production: environmental, social, emotional etc. instead of profit reigning supreme. And we do have more than enough for everyone, it's just being hoarded by capitalist pirates looting the globe.
But of course, our leaders have allowed our country to become ravaged by monopoly capital, whether domestic or foreign. The fruits of our labour are whisked away to tax havens in the Caribbean, or else paid out as bribes to the "professionals" who keep the legislative machinery of capitalism running. Our economy is contracting, being buttressed by immigration which, in a turn to the right that will hardly appease anyone, Trudeau has decided to strangle. 40% of our GDP is locked into real estate, most of it not owned by actual citizens. We produce almost nothing that we consume, in order to use cheap fossil fuel transport and cheap global south labour to line the pockets of these same monopolists in unequal exchange.
Now Trump has dropped a 25% tariff bombshell to force Canada to open itself up to more monopolists in a lopsided trade deal that sees us give over even more of our economic sovereignty. We have become a fossil fuel monocropper, despite needing to transition, and despite our energy being dirtier than any other in the world. And we've strapped ourselves to the Americans, who take 80% of our trade, and who our whole transportation infrastructure is designed around.
Anyone in Canadian politics who does not forward a new plan for economic sovereignty to stand up to this extortion is a traitor. Unfortunately, our political system is full of traitors, and you better believe that unless something incredible happens, they'll sell us, and small towns, down the river.
Well, all work is differentiating and specializing. It’s partly our global corporatist world that is fostering this, of course - more so in denser populations. But, if we're honest, it’s also because of own personal preferences. For example, I don’t want to fly in an airplane designed and cobbled together by generalist jacks-of-all-trades. Ditto, maybe for our health system. And our small town people do like their trips south in the winter
Of course it’s differentiating and specializing, for sure. Thats the nature of socialized labour and technological development. But you can have that and have more free time to pursue other hobbies or vocations. The idea isn’t to end specialization. Most people are working bullshit jobs making stuff we don’t need in any real way. If you educated people and transitioned them into more important jobs, you could have all of the above. We don’t need bloated bureaucracies and we don’t need cheap poisoned fast food, for example, get rid of all this nonsense and focus on real economic and social priorities like clean energy, infrastructure etc.
Peter S - I don't see how any of that is going to save the small town hospital. If one définition of a community is where you are born and where you die, then specialization, no matter how tempered, will (and does now) ensure that will not happen. Ditto for social workers for challenged kids, nurses for elderly psychiatric patients, fuel pump repairs for tractors, etc
Well, we could do all of this now, it's just that the billionaires are hoarding all of our resources. Of course specialization and economies of scale are more efficient, but if we were actually reaping the rewards of our labour, we would have all of this and more. Hospitals are a good example. Maybe you wont have a cardiac centre, a trauma centre, an obstetrics ward, a stroke centre etc. in Timmins, but you could certainly have all of the more routine services there.
This is such a good piece. I just finished the Social Safety Net last week and the connection between neoliberalism and the loss of small towns really resonates. I sent it to a few friends from small towns and it rung true to their experience. One friend said it caused them pain because this article captured what they can see happening. Liberals really hurt the left by selling out small towns to the market and then making it seem as though that disdain comes from all urban people.
My Dad living in Timmins disputes the "Timmins has no labs" statement. Not at the hospital, true, but they have Lifelabs, and gotta think most if not all of the LifeLabs staff live in Timmins. https://www.northeasthealthline.ca/displayservice.aspx?id=90553
Still found this a very interesting argument overall, though!
Nora, you won't remember this but for the first 2 years of your life, you and I started every day with a walk around Rainy River (pop.1000), stopping at the post office, the grocery store (one of 2), and the drug store. You were born at the hospital, and got all your checkups and vaccinations at the clinic. We also had a bank, a nice clothing shop, a furniture and hardware store, 7 churches,, laundromat, and hair salon. The stores were staffed by townspeople and going for our walk was life-saving for this young mother. It was a good community.
Thanks for this description of what Rainy River used to be. I now live in the country west of Thunder Bay and have driven through Rainy River many times on the way to and from Manitoba. When I do, I always wonder about its past given that it now seems to be largely a husk of what used to exist, with few people around, permanently closed businesses, and old, decaying houses.
Closing shop due to racism? That is a new one for me. How did that happen?
As a council member for a community that wasn’t mentioned in that CBC article but has been covered a lot by CBC because we have one of the ERs with the most closures in the province, thank you for writing this. The loss of jobs that follows closures - hospitals, schools, factories, is the slow decline of our towns. And as we try to stem that we are fooled into the “growth is good” mindset and pursue things for this growth, all while wondering, can we actually ever get there? When I pull the thread long enough, there’s nothing on the end and then what? I hadn’t seen this CBC article but it’s the kind of piece that infuriates me and makes me feel like we have to at least try for something else.
Lots to think about here. My hometown ("the Onion Capital of Canada") has no grocery store (but the variety store has produce now), bank, or gas station. The gas station and grocery store that were there went out of business (at least in part) due to racism. Hospitals are at least a 40 minute drive.
Small town or small city? I spent 8 years in a small town, 1,600 people about 40 minutes from Saskatoon. That’s a small town. At that time anyway it had most services except medical facilities.
Timmins is a small city and it’s on the northern edge of you will. There isn’t much north of there so it really should be pretty well serviced but it will never be as well serviced as Sudbury or cities further south. There looks to be more focus on defending the north and that should benefit places like Timmins.
Just over 20 years ago I was offered a job in Timmins and couldn’t afford to turn it down. Fortunately for me they switched the position to Sudbury which was much closer to the places I wanted to go and easier to relocate out of. Had it not been for that opportunity I’d have gone back to Fort McMurray another city on the northern edge. I had worked in Fort McMurray for a year previously and it seemed to have at least one of everything possibly aided by a very high average income.
Most Canadians have no idea about these places but they generate a lot of revenue for the country and are important for our national security.
I was somewhere in that crowd that day! :-)
The economies of scale thesis is definitely right, but there's also other, insidious processes contributing to the fall of rural towns. Places like Timmins have billions of dollars of rare and base earth minerals under them. And while mining work has become better paid and has better health and safety than most mines in the world, and certainly most mines throughout history, the central problem is that all of the profits from the mines are being siphoned off. Take Glencore, for example, which operates in Timmins. 20% of the profits are sent to a Swiss national, and former CEO, and Qatar. Glencore is one of the largest companies in the world, with billions in profits each year.
Imagine the mines were operated by people who live in Timmins, owned by the people in the town, and the profits were instead used to build infrastructure and solve the myriad problems the city faces (not to mention, building a self sustaining indigenous economy to support first nations).
Marx imagined that the productive capacity of the industrial revolution could, if given to the people, allow us to choose our work or spend time in leisure, because we'd have more than enough. It would mean that not every single human experience would need to be commodified and sold. It would mean we would produce things for consumption and not profit. So even though you would still be able to buy cheap apples, because we produce just so much of them, you'd have enough free time to build an orchard and grow local apples yourself. You wouldn't be competing with inexpensive apples, because you wouldn't need to sell them. Moreover, because humans would become so productive, we could factor in all the necessary social considerations into production: environmental, social, emotional etc. instead of profit reigning supreme. And we do have more than enough for everyone, it's just being hoarded by capitalist pirates looting the globe.
But of course, our leaders have allowed our country to become ravaged by monopoly capital, whether domestic or foreign. The fruits of our labour are whisked away to tax havens in the Caribbean, or else paid out as bribes to the "professionals" who keep the legislative machinery of capitalism running. Our economy is contracting, being buttressed by immigration which, in a turn to the right that will hardly appease anyone, Trudeau has decided to strangle. 40% of our GDP is locked into real estate, most of it not owned by actual citizens. We produce almost nothing that we consume, in order to use cheap fossil fuel transport and cheap global south labour to line the pockets of these same monopolists in unequal exchange.
Now Trump has dropped a 25% tariff bombshell to force Canada to open itself up to more monopolists in a lopsided trade deal that sees us give over even more of our economic sovereignty. We have become a fossil fuel monocropper, despite needing to transition, and despite our energy being dirtier than any other in the world. And we've strapped ourselves to the Americans, who take 80% of our trade, and who our whole transportation infrastructure is designed around.
Anyone in Canadian politics who does not forward a new plan for economic sovereignty to stand up to this extortion is a traitor. Unfortunately, our political system is full of traitors, and you better believe that unless something incredible happens, they'll sell us, and small towns, down the river.
Well, all work is differentiating and specializing. It’s partly our global corporatist world that is fostering this, of course - more so in denser populations. But, if we're honest, it’s also because of own personal preferences. For example, I don’t want to fly in an airplane designed and cobbled together by generalist jacks-of-all-trades. Ditto, maybe for our health system. And our small town people do like their trips south in the winter
Of course it’s differentiating and specializing, for sure. Thats the nature of socialized labour and technological development. But you can have that and have more free time to pursue other hobbies or vocations. The idea isn’t to end specialization. Most people are working bullshit jobs making stuff we don’t need in any real way. If you educated people and transitioned them into more important jobs, you could have all of the above. We don’t need bloated bureaucracies and we don’t need cheap poisoned fast food, for example, get rid of all this nonsense and focus on real economic and social priorities like clean energy, infrastructure etc.
Peter S - I don't see how any of that is going to save the small town hospital. If one définition of a community is where you are born and where you die, then specialization, no matter how tempered, will (and does now) ensure that will not happen. Ditto for social workers for challenged kids, nurses for elderly psychiatric patients, fuel pump repairs for tractors, etc
Well, we could do all of this now, it's just that the billionaires are hoarding all of our resources. Of course specialization and economies of scale are more efficient, but if we were actually reaping the rewards of our labour, we would have all of this and more. Hospitals are a good example. Maybe you wont have a cardiac centre, a trauma centre, an obstetrics ward, a stroke centre etc. in Timmins, but you could certainly have all of the more routine services there.
This is such a good piece. I just finished the Social Safety Net last week and the connection between neoliberalism and the loss of small towns really resonates. I sent it to a few friends from small towns and it rung true to their experience. One friend said it caused them pain because this article captured what they can see happening. Liberals really hurt the left by selling out small towns to the market and then making it seem as though that disdain comes from all urban people.
My Dad living in Timmins disputes the "Timmins has no labs" statement. Not at the hospital, true, but they have Lifelabs, and gotta think most if not all of the LifeLabs staff live in Timmins. https://www.northeasthealthline.ca/displayservice.aspx?id=90553
Still found this a very interesting argument overall, though!
Actually, he points out that the Timmins hospital seems to have a lab as well... https://www.northeasthealthline.ca/displayService.aspx?id=147257
draft intro to the 122nd English Canadian edition of the Communist Manifesto ✊🏻♥️