the globe and mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/mind-traps-of-torontos-late-strike/article1236771/

Rick Salutin

Last updated on Friday, Jul. 31, 2009 08:54AM EDT

Cutting labour costs is bad economics. I’m speaking from a macro view. The current economic crisis largely arose from a yawning gap between most people and the very rich. As it grew, public goods – roads, schools, etc. – diminished. In a healthy society, the majority earn decently and can afford taxes for the services they use. But income declines caused people to borrow more in order to maintain their living standards and keep economic demand up. That led to the creation of opaque financial instruments and “financialization” of the economy. All governments now address this problem through stimulus programs. But cutting back workers’ incomes de-stimulates. So the pressure to lower costs, as in Toronto’s strike, runs against the larger societal need for more spending. Yet for 30 years, we’ve been told government is a business and should be run like one. Toronto Mayor David Miller crows like any boss about how he drove wages down and eliminated benefits. The Miller “achievements” will contribute to those negative economic trends. How about government behaving like a government instead? Could it maintain good contracts and contain costs? Yes. If it pays its way as it goes, by raising taxes. I pause to allow the catcalls to subside – there, feel better? And add: only on the richest. Call it a re-redistribution in response to all the redistribution that’s gone from the majority to the very rich. They are different from you and me, Scott: Unlike most people, they don’t and can’t spend all that they have, so they salt the rest away in the Caymans.

Solidarity for never. The labour movement’s watchword is unity, but it also has the potential to divide working people, especially in hard times, between those well-organized or in less vulnerable sectors, and the rest. Solidarity is the goal, but the war of all against all, looms. Why didn’t the strikers at Toronto garbage dump sites help citizens bring in their bags instead of delaying them pointlessly? There was lots of spite from non-strikers too, based on a sense that, if you’re doing badly, you’ll feel better if others like you are also in trouble. That’s probably human nature, not capitalism, at work. Union people recognize these forces and often say unions don’t suffice; they need a political party to fight their battles or a larger vision of “social unionism.” What would that mean concretely? Take the banking of sick days for retirement, which aroused such anti-strike rancour. Could you defuse it with a political measure? Yes, by creating a decent, universal pension plan, just like universal health care.

Class war from above. The Globe’s Marcus Gee wrote that at most, the mayor won a “partial victory.” Others said he “caved.” The National Post headlined, “Unions won, hands down.” His last press conference was like a lynch mob. Please note that the war talk didn’t come from the unions. What had they “won,” to so annoy the class-warmongers? Exactly nothing. They gained nothing, never even aimed to gain. Their goals were to preserve what they had, and they got at most a partial victory. They held onto a diminishing (unto zero) part of their sick days bank, and a fraction of the wage increase that others, like police, received. What kind of victory do the critics want – unconditional surrender? Maybe the mayor should have A-bombed the picket lines. But if you call for social warfare, you might get it. There are scattered signs: VIA went briefly on strike; in South Africa, there are riots against the failure to deliver social justice as promised since the end of apartheid; even in the United States, people have been arrested, calling for single-payer health care. What causes social upheaval is not so much desperation, which is always in supply, as it is overdoses of sanctimony, hypocrisy and double standards.

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/651719

With a solar-powered fridge and four wheels, the Local Café puts a green spin on catering
Jun 17, 2009 04:30 AM
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Pamela Cuthbert
Special to the Star

She’s a baker, farmers’ market vendor, local foods enthusiast – and, lately, a bus driver.

Carole Ferrari is owner of the Local Café, a small catering company that supplies made-from-scratch cookies, cakes and more, prepared in the belly of an old school bus. Her passion for improving food systems got her thinking about the energy costs associated with making and then shipping ready-to-eat foods to their varied destinations. So the long-time cook and daughter of chefs fixed on a solution: a green-themed spin on Meals on Wheels.

“Most of our problems with local food and making it accessible are related to distribution. I wanted to figure out how to shorten the distances,” she says. “Besides, baked goods should be served warm.”

From the outside, the Local Café is a sunshine-yellow minibus notably decorated with two pretty murals of farmers at harvest, painted by Toronto illustrator Sylvia Nickerson. But open up the back doors and you’ll find a unique small pro kitchen that integrates solar power, biodiesel and – the icing on the proverbial cake – locally sourced or fair-trade ingredients. It all adds up to what Ferrari hopes will prove a model for “a tangible and productive way to get things done, and at the same time feed people healthy foods that are affordable.”

For years, Ferrari, a fixture at farmers’ markets around town, has cooked in order to fund what she affectionately calls “The Bus.” The initial purchase of the vehicle was an investment of $6,500, and then another $20,000 was needed to build the kitchen.

“On the one hand, it’s simple: it’s a movable bakery/café,” she says. “But it’s also part of a bigger experiment: can this be done?”

The working space is a mere 7 1/2-by-12 1/2 feet, with the cab doubling as an office. There’s a four-burner stovetop, two stacked bake ovens, cooling racks, three sinks and, the apple of Ferrari’s eye, a solar-powered eight-cubic-foot fridge. Installed by Toronto company SolSmart, the fridge is powered by one panel and three 12-volt batteries hooked up to a generator. A chest fridge, it doubles as counter space and, with four inches of insulation, can run without the generator. It “gets so cold we can turn it into a freezer almost,” says Ferrari. “It’s really, really smart but it’s not necessarily a method to reclaim costs because it’s very expensive.” Next up is a solar hot-water system.

One of the more challenging issues was how to safely create a commercial kitchen using propane in a diesel-fuelled vehicle. Ferrari hired Panda Propane, a company that does motorhome conversions.

“We’ve done a lot of jobs, but never before a bus,” says Panda owner Mark Curl, who runs the company with his father Pat. “Everything has to be done to code and it was really hard. To begin with, it’s not square.”

It took most of last summer to get the system into place and install the tanks, which are located undercarriage alongside the water tanks.

Business is booming for the Local Café. “Another great thing about catering on location is that you’re never late,” says Ferrari, who now works with three part-time staff.

She mentions a typical affair, a Toronto Islands wedding, and rhymes off some key seasonal menu items, along with their sources. There’s a fiddlehead bruschetta, made with St. John’s bread; an herb butter that features herbs from Matchbox Garden and butter from Stirling, Ont.; cinnamon-ginger chicken with spice sourced through Oxfam from a cooperative in Sri Lanka; and meat from Weber’s Mennonite farm in Paisley, Ont. To finish, the rhubarb mint cobbler is all local, including flour milled in Tavistock.

The bus is a work in progress. Ferrari is hoping to find a secure source of clean biodiesel by this summer and is sorting out other issues, such as composting through FoodShare and “saving water, just in general, while keeping everything clean.”

Over an apple cinnamon cookie, she shrugs. “We’re still figuring out how to bake in the bus. I guess it will be about three years before it’s really complete.”

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/665643

Jul 14, 2009 04:30 AM
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Catherine Porter
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

Sarah Nixon surveys her crop. She’s weeded, watered, fertilized with organic kelp. But the blooms she needs are slow to arrive, given the cool summer.

“I have two weddings coming up. I have to just figure that out. That’s one of those things. It’s farming,” says Nixon, clipping the stem of a delicate purple cerinthe for a “romantic-sophisticated” bride coming to survey her bridal bouquet.

Nixon’s farm isn’t out near Milton or Orillia. It’s on Indian Rd. and Marion St. – just a few blocks from Roncesvalles in the city’s west end. She grows flowers in back and front yards around Parkdale and then sells them for weddings, office receptions and, perhaps this season, to one Ossington Ave. florist.

What do the landowners get in return?

“They get a free flower garden without lifting a finger,” says Nixon with a smile.

Nixon is part of the new wave of farming, called SPIN – small plot intensive farming – which is growing in cities across North America. Riding on the crest of the local food wave, SPIN is cashing in on a new eager market.

There are some surprising benefits to growing crops in the city, says the movement’s leader, Wally Satzewich.

You can’t turn a tractor in a tiny backyard, so there are fewer expensive start-up investments, for one. Then, there’s the city’s asphalt, which absorbs the sun’s heat and makes us all sweat more on hot summer nights. But, for farmers, it means a longer growing season in the spring and fall. And there is the garden hose.

“All I have to do is turn on the water faucet in the house and there is irrigation,” says Satzewich, who moved from his 20-acre farm outside Saskatoon into the city 10 years ago. “If I had to go back to getting my tractor to a river bank and getting the pump going … When you’ve learned the hard way out in the country you really appreciate the benefits of the city.”

Plus, there is money to be made. Satzewich says an urban farmer can make $50,000 profit on a half-acre by planting up to four high-end crops like arugula and spinach over a single season.

The idea has taken root with recruits in cities from Atlanta to Vancouver.

“There’s a huge interest in it,” says Harris Ivens, who coordinates a farmer-training program at the Everdale Learning Centre northwest of Toronto near Erin.

More than 30 people attended a workshop on SPIN-Farming he hosted in February. “The field is wide open because there is so much demand for local, ecologically grown food, and so little supply.”

The idea came to Nixon independently, before she’d heard of SPIN-Farming. She simply loved to grow flowers – dropping off pots on friends’ porches from her garden. She decided to make it a business, first in her own yard and then expanding to a few friends’. Next came cold calling – dropping off notes in the mailboxes of homes with big empty yards. Today, her farm business – called My Luscious Backyard – includes five gardens.

While many think of the city as polluted, her farm is as green as it gets, she says. The flowers have none of the carbon emissions or pesticide residue of many imported blooms from Mexico and Peru. She uses less water, irrigating her own backyard with rainwater.

Inside her “barn” – a shed beside her home – she grows them from seed in coconut husks instead of “unsustainable” peat, which “takes 300 years to regenerate,” she says. “We’re draining Canadian bogs.”

She’s just bought a new bike trailer to deliver the weekly bouquets to the dozen offices around town that are her regulars.

“I’m working with a local ceramic artist to make vases so they don’t come from China,” says Nixon, 37.

The drawback, of course, is seasonality. The romantic-sophisticated bride had her heart set on peonies. The blooms are long off that flower in Toronto. Nixon’s hoping she will become enchanted with her white-tipped burgundy lilies or purple drumstick alliums.

“They have to be a bit flexible because we’re dealing with Mother Nature. If that yellow dahlia is not ready on their wedding day, we’ll go with something else. Most brides attracted to organic local farming are not as high-maintenance.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/663185

Police chief hails reduction in Toronto but as trend emerges across continent no one can pinpoint why

Jul 09, 2009 04:30 AM
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Robyn Doolittle
Staff Reporter

Four years after the Summer of the Gun, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair is celebrating a nearly 30 per cent overall drop in crime.

“We have experienced crime reduction numbers in this city that are without precedence anywhere in North America,” Blair said.

The only areas in which they haven’t seen consistent “satisfactory” decreases are some types of violent crime, Blair added, particularly in the number of shootings and homicides.

But compared with this time last year, murder, sexual assault and assault are all down by more than 10 per cent. As of July 4, there were 672 sexual assaults, compared with 796 at the same time last year. There were 8,368 assaults so far this year but 9,412 in 2008.

Break and enters and auto thefts have also declined. The only spike in major crime – and it was a small one at 2 per cent – was in the number of robberies, from 2,142 last year to 2,190 this year.

This downward trend in crime statistics is being documented in cities across Canada and the United States. The most recent study by Statistics Canada shows double-digit declines in Criminal Code offences in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton showed decreases of more than 5 per cent.

In the United States, the Bureau of Justice has recorded steady decreases in both property and violent crime in New York, Detroit and Chicago over the past 10 years.

Rosemary Gartner, a criminologist at the University of Toronto, has been studying the issue for the past six years.

“Basically, since 1993, there’s been a decline across North America. Now what’s causing it? That’s the $60 million question,” she said.

A score of mostly American scholars have produced a wide variety of theories, she said.

One suggested the legalization of abortion in the 1970s allowed mothers to abort unwanted children, who would otherwise have grown up in circumstances that could have led to a life of crime. Other theories suggest changes in the crack cocaine market that sparked turf wars in the late 1980s resolved themselves by the mid-1990s, which led to a decline in violence. Some criminologists have suggested increases in incarceration rates are a factor.

“But the problem with all the explanations is that none of those things were occurring in Canada and we still saw the decreases,” she said. “There’s general agreement that demographics can explain part of it … the aging of the population.”

The average age in Toronto as of 2001 was 35.7. In 2007, that number had climbed to 37.

“But the aging population would only account for anywhere between 5 and 15 per cent. There’s still just this huge unexplained portion,” said Gartner.

Chief Blair credits his brainchild, the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy, known as TAVIS, with much of the decline in crime.

The initiative is a community-based policing strategy, where officers typically patrol by bike or foot and make an effort to get to know locals and business owners by name. It was launched in 2006 with $7 million of provincial funding and has been adopted by more than a dozen forces in the province.

Either by directly adding new officers or freeing up existing resources, Blair credits TAVIS and the provincial funding with putting nearly 500 more officers on the street.

Blair was at the Keele St. and Eglinton Ave. W. area division Tuesday afternoon to accept a $10 million funding promise from the provincial government, which will be put toward maintaining TAVIS.

That is an area of the city that a few months ago found itself in the middle of an escalating turf war.

This summer, 75 TAVIS officers have been deployed to the Jane-Finch and Keele-Eglinton areas.

“Up until about May, there was a very serious violent crime problem in this area,” said Blair. “Now it’s been 57 days since we saw a homicide (in this division). Knock on wood.”

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http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/660864

Deep flaws mar recycling program as tons of organics end up in landfills or are turned into compost so toxic it kills plants
Jul 04, 2009 04:30 AM
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Moira Welsh
Staff Reporter

The City of Toronto boasts that its green bin program diverts a third of our garbage and turns it into “black gold” compost. But a Star investigation shows that the program – although nobly conceived – is a sham.

There are two problems. First, the city’s claim of how much waste the program diverts from landfill is inflated. Second, some of the compost that is being produced will kill your plants because of its high salt content, according to laboratory tests.

The Star found that, over the past two years, thousands of tons of organics in various stages of the composting process have been dumped into a gravel pit, tossed into landfills or stockpiled on city property. What’s more, some of the material residents are told to place in green bins – plastic bags and diapers – has wound up in the belly of a Michigan incinerator, despite Mayor David Miller’s vow Toronto will never burn garbage.

City residents deserve better, say compost experts. At least $15 million of taxpayers’ money goes to truck and treat the organic waste.

“Toronto homeowners put a lot of time and energy into separating their kitchen organics,” says Jim Graham, chair of the Ontario Waste Management Association.

“Residents have the right to expect the processors to do their job – and to create high-quality compost of consumer grade that they can use on their gardens.”

Toronto Mayor David Miller was too busy with the strike to comment, a spokesman told the Star on Thursday.

Geoff Rathbone, the city official in charge of the organic program, told the Star what happens to the organic matter “is not of concern to us” because it’s the provincial Ministry of the Environment’s job to enforce standards on processors.

The green bin program began in 2002, and today 510,000 Toronto homeowners dutifully separate garbage and put the organic waste into green bins for curbside pickup.

Compared to the pure organic programs in Durham and Peel regions, Toronto’s was flawed from the start. After public consultations, the city chose the simplest system for homeowners, encouraging plastic bag liners and the inclusion of diapers, neither of which can be composted.

The city proudly states that the compost it produces is “safe to use in gardens and lawns.”

Tests conducted for the Star by A&L Canada, a leading agricultural laboratory, found serious problems with compost produced by two separate companies contracted by the city to process the organic waste.

In one case, the lab found the compost was unfinished, meaning it was rushed through the process, in which micro-organisms break the waste down into a high-nutrient soil conditioner.

In the second case, the sodium content of compost given out at Toronto’s Environment Days was so high that it would kill plants. (More curing time would have removed naturally occurring sodium in vegetables and the salt we add to food.)

The Star also looked at the city’s so-called “diversion rate,” the markers by which recycling programs are judged. Critics say Toronto’s one-third rate is inflated.

Miller’s re-election promise in 2006 vowed to ramp up diversion rates to 70 per cent by 2010, so there’s pressure on the city to claim the highest possible rate.

Toronto’s annual output of 120,000 tons of organics has created a mad scramble for processors. In each of 2007 and 2008, the city shipped 1,000 truckloads to Quebec. By the time the green bin waste arrived, locked inside plastic bags the city wants residents to use, it was sometimes so rotten it went straight to landfill, says Quebec’s environment ministry. Some processors can’t handle liquefied rotten material.

That burns Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who has spent years trying to track the organic waste. “We have an unwritten rule with the public that the green bin system will have integrity, and the materials they put in the bins will be reused in a meaningful way,” Minnan-Wong says.

“When the food ends up landfilled, or when the compost is toxic, then you are betraying the principles and the reasons why we have this program to begin with.”

Two major compost processors hired by the city to handle the waste – such as leftover steak, banana peels and all those diapers – have been hit with provincial restrictions due to neighbourhood odour complaints.

Within the past two months, before the municipal garbage strike began, Orgaworld Canada in London was severely limited in the amount of organics it could process while Universal Resource Recovery in Welland was shut down entirely. Follow the trail of Toronto’s organics, and the flaws in the system emerge.

The Star found that Orgaworld, which processes about 40 per cent of Toronto’s organic waste, has been sending thousands of tons of “residual” plastics to be burned in Detroit. It turns out about one-fifth of Toronto’s organic output is being burned or buried in landfills.

The city tells residents to put diapers into their green bins.

Graham of the Ontario Waste Management Association also owns Try-Recycling in London. He said the diapers are considered diverted when placed in the compost stream, but are immediately screened out. “Makes for good diversion numbers, but they end up in the landfill anyway,” he said.

Add to that the plastic Toronto wants homeowners to line their bins with. In Durham and Peel, residents are told to buy compostable bags.

Toronto has built a multi-million-dollar system that is sup posed to separate organic waste from non-compostable plastic bags. (It is also planning two new local processing facilities, at a cost of roughly $65 million, using the same technology.) But plastics make the food rot quickly, causing odour problems for processors, and large shreds of plastic end up in the compost.

Nobody wants to see the green bin program scrapped, just made better. Susan Antler, executive director of the Composting Council of Canada, says some municipalities, such as Durham, are “shining stars.” They impose strict limits – no plastic bags, no diapers, and no dog feces and kitty litter. (The latter two are both allowed in Toronto, with feces contributing to odour issues and kitty litter putting clay into the compost.)

“Garbage in means garbage out,” Antler says.

Orgaworld founder Henk Kaskens, who is based in the Netherlands, came to London, Ont., last month to deal with “the fuss” created when the environment ministry ordered Orgaworld to limit its daily intake of green bin material to five trucks, or about 150 tons. Before that it was taking about 1,000 tons a day. (The order was lifted recently, but a new investigation is underway.)

The environment ministry says it has logged 170 odour complaints against Orgaworld since January.

At the same time the ministry hit Orgaworld with the limits, it closed down the second largest processor of Toronto’s organic waste, Welland’s Universal. The ministry told Universal it had logged 120 complaints of odours such as smells akin to “vomit” or “dead animals” since the facility opened last fall.

Toronto was caught in a vice, with nowhere to turn, because all but one of its other processors were facing ministry limitations or Environment Act charges.

Universal general manager Gerald Pratt said his company is taking the odour issues very seriously and is working very hard to fix the problems at the plant.

The problem caused Toronto to stockpile 3,000 tons of organics in city transfer stations – long before the strike began.

Orgaworld’s Kaskens, who said he makes “the best compost in Ontario,” invited the Star for a tour of his plant. He said the odour problems resulted from ducts that crashed from the walls to the floor because a subcontractor had not properly fastened them. He complained the environment ministry is too enforcement-focused and scares away future investments.

Inside the cavernous plant are huge piles of food waste, plastic bags ripped open. Kaskens said his technology turns organics into compost in just 12 to 14 days. The ministry requires it be held another 21 days, but “it is not necessary.”

The Composting Council’s Antler and numerous other industry leaders said they have never heard of compost that can be finished in 12 days. It takes up to six months to cure compost, Antler said. Kaskens pointed out the piles of residual waste, the plastics, in his plant. He said they are trucked to Detroit for incineration.

Neither the city nor compost companies could put a firm figure on the amount of non-organic residuals that are burned or landfilled, giving figures that vary from 15 to 22 per cent and higher.

Welland’s Universal general manager Gerald Pratt put it at 26 per cent, primarily plastic shopping bags. Toronto’s organic waste has a “great deal of contaminants in it,” Pratt wrote in a June letter to a Michigan landfill he hoped would help him after his plant closed.

The Michigan landfill’s manager, Dan Gudgel, said in an interview he could not compost Universal’s organics because the contamination meant it would take too long to get Michigan government approvals.

“I hear you have a state of emergency up there,” he said.

Moira Welsh can be reached at 416- 869-4073 or mwelsh@thestar.ca

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090629/canadian_demographics_090701/20090701?hub=Canada

Will immigration, aging kill Small Town Canada?

Updated Wed. Jul. 1 2009 12:46 PM ET

Andrea Janus, CTV.ca News

Canada has long been celebrated as a multi-cultural society, but the makeup of the Canadian mosaic, now 33 million people strong, has changed over the years.

Two decades ago, the average Canadian was in his or her late twenties, less likely to be in a relationship with someone of a different ethnic origin and new immigrants were more likely to be of European background.

Today, the average Canadian is 39 years old, more likely to be married to someone of a different ethnicity and new immigrants are more likely to be from Asia or the Middle East.

“What we’re seeing in Canada is the changing face of Canadians in that more and more of the Canadian population is coming from places in Africa, Latin America and Asia,” said Mark Rosenberg, a professor of geography and community health and epidemiology at Queens University in Ontario.

“And so the diversity of the Canadian population has changed significantly over the last 20 years,” he told CTV.ca.

According to Statistics Canada’s 2006 census, 20 per cent of the country’s population was foreign-born, the highest percentage since 1931.

In 2006, 58 per cent of new immigrants were from Asia or the Middle East, 11 per cent came from Central and South America, and the Caribbean, while another 11 per cent came from Africa.

Sixteen per cent arrived from Europe, down dramatically from 61 per cent in 1971.

The figures reflect how most immigrants seek a better life in Canada, whether they were fleeing the turmoil of post-war Europe 60 years ago or the current-day economic and political instability across Africa and the Middle East.

But the diversification of Canada’s population corresponds with another change — a willingness to embrace cultural and ethnic differences.

According to the 2006 census, a growing number of Canadians – 41.4 per cent, in fact — said they are of more than one ethnic origin, compared to 38.2 per cent in 2001 and 35.8 per cent in 1996.

And between 2001 and 2006, the number of mixed unions (those between one visible-minority person and either a non visible-minority person or a person of a different visible minority) rose a whopping 33 per cent.

While it’s true that Canadians could only report being of more than one ethnic origin starting with the 1991 census, the data reflects a Canada where citizens are more proud of each others’ differences, Rosenberg suggests.

“I think what’s changed in Canadian society is that not only do you have the statistical artifact, but I think now people are more apt to be proud of their different backgrounds and so identify themselves with respect to their different backgrounds,” Rosenberg said.

“And secondly I also think…we’ve become in some ways more tolerant around people marrying people of other backgrounds. That too has created this statistical change in the census.”

Canadians getting older

While the Canadian population is more diverse than ever, it is also much older.

On July 1, 2007, the median age of Canadians was 39 years. In 1971, it was 26 years.

Canada’s aging population is largely a result of our relatively low birth rate — in 2004, it fell to 10.5 live births for every 1,000 population, the lowest since such statistics began to be compiled in 1921.

Indeed, because two-thirds of Canada’s population growth comes from immigration and not new births, Canada is not far behind Japan, considered the world’s “oldest” country with a median age of 41.

By contrast, 60 per cent of the population growth in the United States comes from a higher birth rate. The average age there is 36.6.

But compared to other “older” countries, such as Japan, that have very restricted immigration policies, Canada will remain relatively young (it is still one of the youngest in the G8) thanks to the more than 240,000 people who settle here every year.

“It makes us unique with respect to many of what we might term ’slow growth’ countries, because in many of the other slow-growth countries, immigration is a lot more constrained and so the populations are just growing older,” Rosenberg said.

Goodbye Small Town Canada?

If Canada’s population growth is largely attributable to immigration, and the majority of immigrants settle in and around Canada’s largest cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver), are the days of small towns numbered?

More than four out of five Canadians live in an urban area, according to the 2006 census, and those areas grew more rapidly than rural areas between 2001 and 2006.

And while 35.7 per cent of urban residents in Canada were between the ages of 20 and 44, only 27.7 per cent were between those ages in Canada’s rural areas.

But Rosenberg said it is unlikely that, even though young adults leave small towns in large numbers to pursue higher education and job opportunities, Canada’s rural villages will disappear completely.

“It’s not about the disappearances of Small Town Canada,” Rosenberg said. “But it is about the disappearance of some communities, particularly some of the smallest communities in rural and northern places, that will slowly see their populations disappear.”