Developing the North in British Columbia

Boom and bust

Northern British Columbia has twice the land mass of the United Kingdom but only some 300,000 residents. The University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) was founded in 1994. From its main campus in Prince George, it undertakes research and teaching across this enormous land mass, supported by smaller campuses in strategic locations. One of its central missions is to promote sustainable development in the north.

This is not an easy task. All of northern Canada, but especially northern BC, continues to reflect a pioneering tradition. Non-indigenous migrants have come and gone, cutting down or digging up the land’s riches and often then abandoning the settlements used for this purpose. A model first devised in the 1930s to describe this pattern of development – the staples economy – still accurately describes much of the region’s activities, which are predominantly based on the export of semi-processed timber, mineral ores and fossil fuels to international markets.

Global businesses engaged in these sectors lease land at low cost from the provincial government (which retains control over more than 90% of the land and its resources). In return they fund the infrastructure to ship their products quickly out of the area and onto the world market. BC’s primary northern activity, harvesting and processing softwood timber, still focuses on basic ‘2 by 4’ house construction requirements and chips for pulp mills, and has generated little local value-added spin-off.

All this produces a pattern of resource-based settlements heavily dependent on economic vicissitudes over which local residents have little control. The resulting boom and bust cycle of development does little to promote a sustainable use of the region’s resources, or to encourage the construction of long-term communities that are designed to offer an attractive place for living and bringing up families. Many people work in the north simply for good wages, and are reconciled to leaving when the jobs disappear. Others, with a long-term commitment to the region’s stunning beauty and outdoor way of life, want a better alternative to boom and bust.

A team of planning researchers from the University of Dundee, Scotland, has been working with fellow planning academics at UNBC over the past decade to explore ways of stimulating endogenous economic activity in the area, by applying modern planning and economic development tools. In this article, we briefly recount some of the issues we are addressing, which have resonance for economic development in many of our own UK rural communities reliant on resource extraction.

A new urban planning paradigm

Vancouver, BC’s main city located in the Lower Mainland, hosted a World Planning Congress in 2006 which issued a declaration setting out ten principles on which a New Urban Planning paradigm should be based. These principles make sustainability the overarching aim, and call for integrated planning to this end, with a heavy emphasis on community engagement and decentralization to local government and communities where feasible, and explicit recognition of cultural diversity. We set out to test such principles in the context of northern BC, having obtained seed-corn funding from the Canadian Government and the Carnegie Scottish Universities Trust, with a view to launching a larger research project if the scoping results proved promising.

This is not the place to describe our initial findings in detail. Instead, we focus on some of the central themes that quickly became apparent. Our research involved a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in two archetypical northern settlements. The results provide ample support for these themes, covering both economic development policies and more specific planning issues. We shall be publishing a detailed analysis of our findings over the next year. This early report gives us the opportunity to flag up areas which we believe will be of interest to economic development practitioners confronted with similar problems in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

Absence of regional planning

Northern BC is currently a boom region, confronted by crucial trans-continental spatial development issues. These include heavy investments in transport infrastructure to shift resource-based commodities between Edmonton in Alberta and Prince Rupert, BC’s northern deepwater port offering the shortest route to China; and major pipeline development from the north shore of Alaska and the North West Territories along the Alaska Highway corridor or the Mackenzie Valley and into the continental energy markets.

Despite these fundamental challenges to its future, northern communities lack adequate economic development expertise. They need the people and the funding necessary to make these major strategic developments feed into local settlements rather than by-passing them. They also need the means to ensure that these developments do not create irreparable damage to the regional environment.

The north lacks a coherent regional development plan, into which its communities' individual local land use and development plans can be fitted. Spread across this vast area are a myriad of committees and councils covering private land holdings in municipalities and regional districts, together with monitoring and evaluation stakeholder panels for provincial public sector land and resource management plans. Yet there is no overall strategic vision for the future to tie in all these communities.

The provincial government maintains control over most resources. It applies policies determined in Victoria, the provincial capital located hundreds of miles away at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, through regional ministerial offices for forestry, health, education and the environment. In 2003 these regional offices were drastically pruned, leaving little provincial capacity for new initiatives.

The federal government in Ottawa funds a number of development initiatives, of which Community Futures is the nearest to a development agency in the sense understood in the UK. This voluntary not-for-profit organization is contracted by Western Diversification, a federal ministry, under a mandate intended to assist rural communities in developing strategies for dealing with a changing economic environment.

Local government in most northern communities lacks the capacity to support an adequate range of economic development activities and to respond to new demands. Many councils do not even have a single economic development officer. As a result, there is a great deal of ad hoc planning, with cross-government initiatives funded on a short term basis as they become pressing and as provincial or federal funds appear.

New opportunities

Despite these capacity constraints on the ground, the economic development profession has plenty of good ideas about how to shift the focus of the region onto a more sustainable axis. The remainder of the article briefly looks at some of the more promising, for which our field research has found supporting evidence. The themes listed below are not mutually exclusive. They support a series of synergistic policies that together offer a different approach to the development of resource-based communities. What we outline is drawn from North American research, but similar contributions to the research discourse can also be found on this side of the Atlantic, particularly in respect to modulation of Common Agricultural Policy funding and renewed emphasis on rural diversification.

New rural economy; The New Rural Economy (NRE) has been posited as a knowledge-based alternative to reliance on resource-based activities in rural areas. Instead of a production-based system of resource management designed to meet the needs of commodity markets, the NRE relies on knowledge-based services. Many of these, such as environmental and renewable energy services, outdoor leisure and recreation activities, habitat and species protection and conservation of the built and natural environment, face income-elastic demand for their output. The key to delivering the NRE model of development is to grasp its very different organizational requirements from the traditional drivers of rural development. According to one source, "ethe evidence points to talent for organizing knowledge as the real heartbeat of the leading edge NRE (ii). To complement these requirements, the pattern of local government functions has to differ in an emerging NRE, with less emphasis on service provision, and more on promoting, facilitating, and participating in acquiring, knowledge.

The creative class as a rural driver; New forms of rural governance allow the realization of what Richard Florida (ii) has identified as a key driver of growth; the concentration of creative classes in an area. As formulated by Florida, such classes congregate in suitable metropolitan locales. However, recent research has pointed to a discernible trend affecting remote rural areas which supports a significant boost to employment and in-migration; the appeal of natural amenities and associated recreational opportunities is sufficiently strong for many in the creative class to locate in rural areas rich in outdoor amenities (iii). This suggests that suitable locales can enjoy a major boost to their local economies by marketing and protecting those rural outdoor attributes that attract and retain creative class migrants.

Amenity migration; Finally, and specifically for the mountainous western areas of North America, these two drivers have been combined with the concept of amenity migration. This focuses on a trend in recent years for many city dwellers who are under no serious economic constraints [to choose] to become permanent residents of rural places that offer outstanding natural, social and built environment qualities (iv). Census data suggests that amenity migration is the main driver of growth in many Rocky Mountain communities, displacing traditional resource-based activities. Evidence suggests that local planning authorities and development agencies still do not recognize the significance of amenity migration. More specifically, they often do not realize that promotion of large scale tourist resort attractions can so alter the attraction of an area to potential in-migrants as to undermine amenity migration, resulting in an overall negative impact on the locale.

Even for rural areas without mountains, but with a high quality of environment, these findings offer lessons on ways of promoting patterns of sustainable development capable of attracting footloose creative classes seeking a suitable amenity migration locale.

Authors - Tony Jackson & Barbara Illsley (University of Dundee); John Curry & Eric Rapaport (University of Northern British Columbia)