Recently, one of the main challenges facing rural areas was on the front page of Duty. It must be recognized that unless there are exceptional events, it is rather rare that they find themselves at the center of media news. For reasons that are difficult to pin down, there also seem to be fewer and fewer researchers interested in this segment of space.
This was a file on the crumbling of services, a structural phenomenon that we have observed since the 1990s and which tends to increase in particular due to the change in consumer habits, demographic aging, decline of religious practice and community life, the emergence of new information and communication technologies or the situation of rural localities in space.
Indeed, the erosion of local services began with the closures of post offices. Then, it was the turn of the last school in the village. The Solidarité agricole du Québec organization has been particularly proactive in this latest issue by sounding the alarm and proposing various avenues of solutions put forward by local and regional stakeholders. Some innovative actions (environmental schools, circus schools, grouping of cycles) have emerged, such as in Sainte-Paule or at JAL, in Bas-Saint-Laurent, a region affected by the erosion of its local services such as the ‘mentioned data from the Institute of Statistics of Quebec.
In the 2000s, the closures of cash registers, ATMs, gas stations, convenience stores and churches followed one another to the point where the service infrastructure in small rural communities crumbled as skin of sorrow. In some places, this infrastructure is no longer even reduced to the strict minimum.
Part of our doctoral thesis was devoted to this issue in 2003. In fact, the phenomenon has become so worrying that it was the subject of a Concerted Research Action set up by the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la society and culture. We contributed to this vast project while we were employed by the Canada Research Chair in Rural Development under the direction of Bruno Jean. We have, among other things, identified various initiatives from different countries in order to mitigate the effects of such erosion which hampers the development of rural areas.
Several of these social innovations materialized through the grouping of services under the same roof (“One stop shop”), on-demand transportation, the delivery of different services offered through La Poste, in France, and intermunicipal agreements. or intercommunal, etc. Despite the multiple initiatives that have emerged in Quebec as elsewhere, the infrastructure of local services in rural areas has continued to wither away. In such a context, is it not legitimate to ask whether it is relevant to stop this hemorrhage or should we rather favor the concentration of services in more populous rural areas, or even in urban areas?
Due to the many functions that local services perform in rural areas, the first option appears to us to be the most realistic. In one of his articles, the geographer Clermont Dugas recalled that local services fulfill, first of all, the role for which they were created, that is to say a utilitarian function which contributes to shaping the social structure, economic and even physical of the village.
Because of the place they occupy in socio-economic life, services also have a structuring effect. They contribute to the maintenance, consolidation and renewal of the settlement fabric. A rural community without services is certainly not likely to attract young families. The services also take on the form of a symbol reflecting both belonging, relational life, integration into the community and the dynamism of the environment. The parish church, which today serves several villages, continues to exercise this role in certain high moments of human life (births, marriages, deaths) or of the liturgical year (Christmas, Easter), in addition to animating a certain community life, particularly in terms of mutual aid.
On a social level, the services have both a function of strengthening, building and integrating links within the community itself, but also outside it. We are witnessing certain experiments where we extend the concept of vending machines to certain basic essential food products. At no time will an automated service or one offered on the Internet be able to replace the warmth of human contact which contributes to the well-being of elderly people and curbs their isolation. We much prefer initiatives such as hair salons or mobile or itinerant markets that visit remote areas or seniors’ residences with a specially equipped vehicle.
Finally, since the 1970s, services have been the main provider of jobs in rural areas. They also have knock-on effects on other sectors of economic activity. The presence of a cash register, for example, represents a retention factor for businesses.
Despite their good will, it is unlikely that local actors will be able to reverse this serious trend which is the crumbling of the service infrastructure in rural areas. Except in rare exceptions, this issue no longer arouses passions, territorial solidarity having given way to societal individualism or to the TLM syndrome (Always the same people who get involved) which fuels the demobilization process.
However, it is generally accepted that the majority of rural people still wish to keep their school, their church, their fund, access to health services, as well as the infrastructures which form the identity of the area. It is therefore up to the State to deploy, as part of its “vitalization” strategy, a component specifically dedicated to maintaining local services in rural areas.
Three parameters should be taken into consideration, namely: the evolution of aging, the distance from the city and the demographic size of the localities, the smallest should receive particular attention. The “vitality” index of the Quebec Statistics Institute could also serve as a benchmark to support and modulate the financial support of this same strategy for the most fragile environments. We are not aiming for all rural communities in Quebec to have their own credit union, school, convenience store or pharmacy. But that these services are found at a reasonable distance from the main urban centers and that means are deployed to offer a minimum of services on site, hence the name “proximity”, in the interest of territorial equity, a principle unifier of regional development, and equal opportunities in particular for the most vulnerable people in our society.
Quebec sets an example on a global scale in terms of its municipalities’ adherence to the MADA approach. But what is the point of being part of this network in the absence of local services to meet the needs of seniors? Providing local services in rural areas represents a major challenge that can be successfully met with a view to promoting dynamic occupation of the territory, in addition to constituting an excellent tool for combating disparities.