Is tourism the solution to small-town Canada's woes?

I'm not an expert on economic development, but you don't have to be one to realize that urbanization is slowly killing off Canada's small-town communities. Youth are moving to cities, and new immigrants to Canada also choose to live in larger cities when they can. Increasingly, Canada's small towns are looking like retirement communities.

On the political front, there are certainly voices advocating a stronger role for city governments, which is a good thing, given their rising importance. But it seems to me that some attention needs to be paid to the small towns as well - and not necessarily by the same government department. At what point does a town cease to be viable? Is this a reversable trend?

These ponderings are prompted by two events in my life. The first was a vacation last week at a friend's cottage in the Muskokas. When we were picking up groceries in Huntsville (a town whose development I've followed since the 1980s, when my grandparents used to have a cottage on Lake of Bays), I was struck by two phenomena. The first is how the residents of the town itself are quite old, and there is a striking prevalence of retirement homes. (My mother lives there, so this is not just a random observation, but confirmed by a local informant.) The second is how the town has reinvented itself as a hub for the cottagers. A striking number of businesses exist almost exclusively for the summer cottagers of Muskoka. We noticed this most at the Robinson's Independent Grocery, which is now a Loblaws' megastore-sized complex on the outskirts of the town in a new development. The only people shopping there were camp counsellors and cottagers - and the product selection (which was awesome) is tailored to them. The only locals seemed to be the cashiers. Apparently, the locals all shop at the Price Chopper.

I recognize that the Muskokas are likely the exception, as the playground for Ontario's (and the US's) rich (and those lucky enough to have family cottages that predate the price explosion), but it got me thinking about whether Huntsville's survival strategy - essentially as a tourism hub - is the wave of the future for small communities. Other mid-northern Ontario towns seem to have the same approach, just scaled down somewhat.

The second factor driving this ramble is my upcoming move to Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick. I'm not the first person to comment on the economic situation in the Maritimes, I recognize. What struck me most, however, was how the region was building up infrastructure to facilitate tourism. The highways in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are excellent, and they have a 110 km/h speed limit! This could be the product of a make-work project using federal transfer payments (as some cynical friends of mine claimed), or it could be a cunning plan to make the region more desirable for tourists. Nova Scotia has cleverly couched all of its provincial highways in terms of scenic routes (as had PEI, when I was last there). To me, this seems to be the nuts-and-bolts side of developing Maritime tourism. The cultural side is the "Quest for the Folk" invention/commodification of folk traditions that historians Ian McKay and Alan Gordon have been studying recently.

While economic development is needed in both of these cases, I worry about the possible creation of a two-tier Canada. The upper tier would be the urban Canadians with disposable incomes, the lower tier the rural/small-town Canadians who work service jobs in their own communities so that the urbanites can play and vacation there. I'm not certain what the alternative is, and would welcome some ideas.

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