Canada’s housing crisis is getting a lot of attention.
In September, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre introduced a private members bill that would tie the infrastructure funding the federal government provides to municipalities to a stated threshold of extra homes built in that municipality per year.
On Nov. 7, federal Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos announced new housing to be built on federal properties in four Canadian cities, putting the Canada Lands Company (a Crown corporation), on track to build more than 29,200 homes in the next six years.
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According to a Sept. 13 report published by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada needs 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than what are now being built to keep housing affordable. Of that 3.5 million, B.C. and Ontario account for 60 per cent because of their urban centres, where housing supply is consistently falling behind demand.
Having grown up in and travelled throughout rural Manitoba, it feels a little ironic. As urban populations cry for housing, there’s a long list of rural communities that have watched their populations shrink for decades.
I can think of two changes that, taken together, might use one problem to fight the other.
One of those is already on governments’ radar and the lobby list for farm and rural organizations: the need for truly widespread, reliable internet and cell service.
Lack of connectivity is a perennial thorn in the side of rural Canadians, and Manitoba is no exception.
“Currently, Manitobans experience the second-slowest internet speeds in Canada,” a statement on the Association of Manitoba Municipalities website reads. “Residents, businesses, and public institutions expect a functional level of cellular coverage and bandwidth that is reasonably comparable to the expectations of urban customers.”
Lack of connectivity is more than an irritation; it’s a barrier to keeping people and businesses in rural communities or attracting new ones.
Fixing it will also likely need at least some government incentive, given the relative lack of potential customers out here. It’s a hard business case for private enterprise.
Government efforts on rural connectivity so far haven’t exactly hit it out of the park.
There are some success stories. In southern Manitoba, local councils helped bring in high-speed internet through Winkler-based company Valley Fibre.
But the province’s 2021 contribution agreement with Xplornet, which was supposed to bring broadband connectivity to northern and rural Manitoba, was most recently in the news for a financial dispute that stalled the project.
The second change is normalization of remote work. This already had its trial by fire during the pandemic and most companies have the foundation to incorporate this work style.
There are a lot of non-housing arguments for removing the commute. Environmentally, it means fewer vehicles on the road. In terms of work-life balance, no commute means more time spent on more rewarding and productive things. Remote workplaces can also be more friendly to employees with disabilities.
But remote work also de-couples the employee from the office, an office that may limit people’s housing decisions to the same urban areas that have a housing crisis.
If the office is wherever the wifi is, and if the wifi is good, a rural housing option might start to look awfully attractive.
And while the prospect of new, urban-acclimated neighbours may make farmers wary, at the very least, more capacity for remote work could help farm communities keep their kids.
The combination of a good internet connection and remote work opens new doors for non-farming kids to return to their communities, where they have roots, a family support structure and where they might be able to find a house in town without paying $300,000 for a two-bed bungalow on a postage-stamp yard.
There is no reason that, at the current level of technology, rural kids of various careers can’t stay close to home if they want to. And with urban Canada feeling the keen pinch of a housing crisis, maybe the time is right to make the societal case for closing some of the gaps that keep that from happening.
