`CHANGE IS NECESSARY'
Saskatchewan's rural-to-urban shift has meant tough decisions and new realities for many people
Roy Romanow's three-decade career in Saskatchewan politics began in the 1960s amid an ongoing decline in the number of farms and a pronounced shift from rural to urban.
“When I first got active in politics, three-quarters of a section or a section of farmland — that was thought to be a pretty big farm operation,” Romanow recalls in an interview. “Today, the holdings are very large.”
Some of the difficult decisions Romanow's government had to make while he was premier from 1991 to 2001 can be linked to the shift from rural to urban that's been happening pretty well since the province was settled.
The reality and inevitability of that shift did not make it easy to make tough calls, like closing rural hospitals.
“Change, it's easy to talk about, not so easy to implement,” says Romanow, who also served as deputy premier from 1971 to 1982.
Saskatchewan's origin is told by its unique trapezoid shape, which resulted from the offer of free farm land on the Prairies under the 1872 Dominion Lands Act during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Any man over 18 or woman who headed a household received 160 acres of land for a small registration fee. Saskatchewan's straight borders show how the land was carved up to attract settlers.
The settlement push was intended to prevent a claim on the sparsely populated territory by the United States; it resulted in Saskatchewan becoming the third most populous province for decades, behind Ontario and Quebec.
Not only did Saskatchewan eventually drop from No. 3, the shift in where people lived and how they made a living began right away.
“Once the province was initially settled, almost immediately technology changed,” explains Rose Olfert, professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan's Johnson Shoyama School of Public Policy.
“The horse and wagon was replaced by the internal combustion engine. It soon became the case that larger sized farms were much more economical and produced goods much more efficiently. So farms very rapidly became much larger.”
That change meant fewer farms and an ongoing move from predominantly rural to mostly urban — depending on how you define those terms.
Yet Saskatchewan remains distinctly rural in the context of Canada.
In 2016, according to information from the last census, Saskatchewan had 3.1 per cent of Canada's total population, but 15.8 per cent of the farm population.
During the first quarter of the 20th century, Saskatchewan's population exploded to 820,738 in 1926 from 91,279 in 1901. But it also grew increasingly urban in that same period, with the rural population dropping to 70.45 per cent from 81.2 per cent.
The province with the name derived from the Cree word for “swiftly flowing river” achieved official provincial status in 1905 and became the third largest province by 1911 with 492,432 people.
The province maintained the third largest population into the 1940s, hitting 921,785 by 1931 before declining to 895,992 by 1941.
By 1951, Saskatchewan had dropped out of the top three for good.
Also, during the first quarter of the 20th century, the farms in Saskatchewan skyrocketed.
From 1901 to 1926, the number of occupied farms grew to 117,781 from 13,445 and the area dedicated to farming increased to 45.9 million acres from 3.8 million.
In 1926, Saskatchewan boasted nearly as many farms as the combined 130,381 farms in Alberta and Manitoba and had more area occupied by farms than the combined 43 million acres in both neighbouring provinces.
“Agriculture was always export geared in Saskatchewan,” Olfert explains.
“Saskatchewan would not exist had it not been for the attraction of growing grain here on the Prairies and exporting it to Europe. That was the only reason why they bothered with settling people here at all.”
But the number of farms and the share of the population living in rural areas has been in steady decline for decades. The rural population has declined in actual numbers, too, after peaking at 630,880 in 1931, which was 68 per cent of the total population at the time.
In 1901, prior to official province status, the area covered by Saskatchewan was home to 91,279 people with 15.6 per cent living in urban areas, or about 14,266 folks — fewer than the current population of North Battleford.
Olfert says the shift in Saskatchewan reflects what's been happening around the world.
“It's a long, long process,” she says. “The general pattern, trend doesn't change. There are variants. There are some exceptions. There's nothing magical or sinister. Nobody has done any of this by design. It's just the way people live and function and what works.”
Through the first half of the 20th century, Saskatchewan's shift from rural to urban was gradual, with nearly 70 per cent of people living in rural areas as the 1950s began. Then, the urban revolution hit.
In 1961, Saskatchewan had the second-lowest urban population at 43 per cent, behind only Prince Edward Island at 32.4 per cent; by 2016, the percentage of urbanites in Saskatchewan had increased to two thirds.
From 1961 to 2016, Saskatchewan experienced Canada's largest increase in urban population at 23.8 per cent; only Alberta was close at 20.3 per cent. During that same span in Canada, the urban population increased from 69.6 per cent to 81.3 per cent.
“That's a trend that's continuing,” says Bob Patrick, associate professor and chair of the regional and urban planning program at the U of S. “I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon or change drastically. We're going to become more and more urban. I think the big question is what will that urban form look like.”
Although the definition of rural has changed over time, rural areas in Canada are now defined as those with fewer than 1,000 people occupying a territory with fewer than 400 people per square kilometre.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) counters that, in this province, rural should be defined as communities with fewer than 5,000 people.
In Saskatchewan, municipalities can apply for city status once they reach 5,000 people, while town status can be granted at 500 and village status at 300.
But some towns have shrunk well below 500, notably Scott, with just 73 people in 2016. The same year, the village of Caronport had 994 people.
In 2016, 41.9 per cent of Saskatchewan's population lived in Regina and Saskatoon, which are considered large urban centres because they have more than 100,000 people.
That was followed by 33.2 per cent in “rural” areas with fewer than 1,000 people, 17.7 per cent in “small population centres” with 1,000 to 29,999 people and 7.2 per cent in population centres between 30,000 and 99,999 people (Moose Jaw and Prince Albert).
Both Olfert and Patrick agree that definitions can prove challenging in Saskatchewan and there are differences between how others see us and how we see ourselves.
If you use SARM'S 5,000-person threshold, Saskatchewan would be considered 40 per cent rural in 2016.
Olfert points out that some academic research uses a 250,000-people threshold to define urban. Under that definition, only Saskatoon qualifies as urban.
“For most of the world, all of Saskatchewan is rural,” she says.
Kindersley has reached the 5,000-person threshold to apply for city status, but Patrick wonders whether that makes the community urban. He also points to Melfort, an official city with about 7,000 people.
“Would people in Kindersley think of themselves as urban?” Patrick asks. “It all depends; they might not think urban, they might think town.”
Regardless of how you define urban and rural, the trend remains obvious.
From 2011 to 2016, Saskatchewan's population grew by 6.3 per cent to 1.1 million. The number of people living in cities grew by 9.9 per cent, compared to 2.7 per cent growth in towns, 1.1 per cent in rural municipalities and negligible growth in villages.
The urban growth and rural decline proved difficult to ignore for Romanow's government when faced with a debt crisis as it took over at the start of the 1990s.
The pressure to address the debt prompted the NDP government to close dozens of hospitals in rural areas that were considered less viable than those in urban centres serving expanding populations.
The governing Saskatchewan Party still uses the rural hospital closures regularly as ammunition against the Opposition NDP. The measure has arguably made the NDP nearly irrelevant outside urban areas.
Romanow says the decision was difficult for the NDP, which began as the rural-based Co-operative Commonwealth Federation under premier Tommy Douglas.
“Those (changes) are very difficult to do; even if it's obvious to communities that change is necessary and should be implemented, no one wants to lose their rural hospital,” Romanow says.
Population, in general, has always been a primary consideration in decision making, he adds.
“You have to be able to match the service that the taxpayers are paying (for) to their tax dollars ... say health care or education or highways, with what is actually needed out there.”
Despite the shift in population and priorities, Saskatchewan still boasts a lot of municipal governments: 775 in total (that does not include hamlets, which are not independently governed). That's more than twice the 352 in Alberta, even though the latter province has nearly four times as many people.
Alberta reorganized many of its rural communities into counties in the 1960s, Olfert explains.
Saskatchewan's people now live in 16 cities, 147 towns, 250 villages, 296 rural municipalities, 41 resort villages, 25 northern municipalities and 144 hamlets. There are also 70 First Nations whose members live on 782 reserves, villages and settlements.
Despite the numbers still living in places classified as rural, the number of farms and the role played by agriculture in the provincial economy have declined.
The number of farms in Saskatchewan grew steadily before peaking in 1941 at 138,713. That number dropped to 67,318 by 1981. By 2016, the number of farms had plummeted to 24,523.
Agriculture in Saskatchewan was worth $7.2 billion in 2019 or about 8.8 per cent of GDP, well behind mining and oil and gas extraction at 25.7 per cent.
Agriculture employs 40,800 people, about seven per cent of the 586,500 employed in 2019.
While all these numbers tell a story, it's not the entire story, Olfert and Patrick say.
“For the people who live in smaller cities or rural areas, they would tell you that the statistics don't tell you anything about the quality of life,” Olfert says. “Many people are very attached to their rural communities or their small cities and they are very adamant that they enjoy a very good quality of life.”
That quality of life can create inertia that can keep smaller communities going for decades, she says. There are other factors, too, such as economic barriers.
“If you have a house in a tiny community and you're considering moving to Saskatoon or Regina, it's not a very attractive proposition because the price you're going to get for your house in the small village is very different than the price you're going to have to pay if you move into Saskatoon,” Olfert says. “So they stay there.”
Romanow acknowledges that technology has made contact with more remote and rural communities easier, but thinks real face-toface contact with rural communities still rates as important for politicians and decision makers.
“The modern-day technology can only help you so far. You really have to sit down and listen to their concerns, the hopes, the aspirations, the unhappinesses, whatever the complaints or the concerns might be,” Romanow says. “And I think there is a growing tendency to bypass that.”
However, SARM made better access to broadband in rural areas a top rural issue in the October provincial election since internet access became a vital lifeline for more remote locations during the pandemic.
Patrick also wonders whether the COVID-19 pandemic has put a new spin on the rural versus urban divide.
The high number of people working from home could force a rethink of quality of life, since location matters less than it used to for many people.
Patrick himself sold his Saskatoon house and is now teaching classes remotely while living near a coastal community in British Columbia.
“Maybe we'll see a resurgence of rural or semi-rural living as it's more acceptable for people to live and work from home,” he says. “I think we're going to see a real shift.”
But an aging population could counter any big shift toward a rural resurgence because people will want to remain close to health care and other services, he adds.
In that vein, Patrick thinks small communities near larger centres could benefit from the population shift. This appears to be borne out in Saskatchewan, with both Warman and Martensville near Saskatoon growing to become cities of more than 10,000.
More remote cities like Melfort or Meadow Lake could also sustain or grow their populations, Patrick says, as people living in nearby smaller communities may want to remain close to home in a centre with more services.
Ultimately, though, Patrick uses Darwinian evolution to explain the inevitable trend that will benefit some communities and doom others.
“It's almost like sort of survival of the fittest,” he says. “Once you have that critical mass, that centre of population and that centre of economic activity, then past that threshold and you're going to be OK, you're going to survive it and you're going to grow. But if you're behind, you're going to lose.”