Welcome to the February postings of the CIT Information Resource!

Social media and the conversation about land in BC
How important are social media to what Tim Pringle calls "the conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities?"

That's one of the questions we're going to be asking through an on-line survey in the coming months. What's clear is that more and more of you are using things like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or VIMEO, and podcasts, as well as blogs to tell the story of your community and the challenges and opportunities related to the land base.

When we started CITinfoResource as a blog-based way of capturing some of the exciting ideas and stories related to Communities in Transition projects we were very new to these new social media. That's changing. Rapidly. Some of us are quite active. Others less so. Some use things like Facebook purely for family and personal purposes. For example, Jen McCaffery, the principle CIT contact at the Real Estate Foundation of BC before taking mat leave, began to share the story of her new baby several months ago. Tim Pringle signed on, first as a curious "listener," and then as a thoughtful commentator on land use related posts on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. Executive Director Karin Kirkpatrick has recently started mini-blogging her experiences on Facebook from her iPhone, making the transition from a driver to a transit user – and micro-blogger – an engaging and educational process to witness.

CITinfoResource has an active presence online. We've updated our URL so it's easy to find: www.CITinfoResource.com. You can also find us easily on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and VIMEO (search "CITinfoResource"). We're slowly building a library of images at Flickr. Please, take a look. Leave a comment. If you like what we're doing, add us to your favourites or become a "fan." We encourage all partner organizations to tag or label CIT-related photographs, videos, and posts with #CITinfoResource so we can help tell your story. Social media is making it easier to tell the story of change. It's also making it easier, as I describe in the closing column, for some local governments and NGOs to communicate with their constituents and to find cost-effective and time-sensitive responses to critical issues and opportunities.

Whether you receive CIT information via email, Twitter link, or Facebook post – or as a photocopy – you are participating in the "conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities." If you're online, you'll notice that we're moving towards more "rich" content – audio and video posts instead of simple text-based blogs. Let us know if these formats are useful to you. As we noticed in the comments that flowed from Janine de la Salle and Mark Holland's piece on urban agriculture in November, some topics are hot and worthy of extended comments, and some formats make it very easy to engage people from across the province. We invite you to have your say!

Land use practitioners
The Governors at the Real Estate Foundation of BC have, over time, supported a diversity of perspectives and approaches to land use and conservation in BC. That's a boone to us at CITinfoResource, because we get to highlight very different ways of looking at our common resource. George Penfold, the Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Community Economic Development at Selkirk College (Castlegar) is a regular contributor. This month he asks about BC's rural development policy, a comment on a story we've been covering since before the October 2008 Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George. Nicole Vaugeois, RIC in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University (Nanaimo), writes about her research and community economic development activities.

Our other posts in this theme are audio interviews. Bryn White, Coordinator of the South Okanagan-Similkameen Conservation Partnership, describes this innovative regional approach to the "conversation about use and conservation of land" and how it is building capacity in local organizations, including local government. Kim Fowler is now the Sustainability Coordinator with the City of Victoria, but has worked with other municipalities and with the private sector. She talks about "performance-based" and "regulation-based" approaches to sustainable land use planning and development.

Following up on Resilient Cities, the 2009 Gaining Ground Summit
One of the things that social media allow us to do is to give conferences "long tails" – we interview organizers and participants before, during, and after important gatherings related to land use and sustainability in BC, and these materials are then available indefinitely on the internet. Our current focus is on Resilient Cities, the October 2009 Gaining Ground Summit in Vancouver. We asked a number of participants what their strongest impressions were of this powerful event, and what impact it will have on their home communities. We offer an audio interview with Naomi Devine, Whistler's Sustainability Coordinator and video interviews with Doug Makaroff, a developer involved with the Living Forest Communities initiative, as well as Gaining Ground founder Gene Miller.

Research notes – Green Values Vancouver Island
For several years the Governors of the Foundation have supported Green Values Vancouver Island, an initiative that looks at real estate development and sustainability on Vancouver Island's southeast quarter, which includes parcels of land associated with the E&N Land Grant of the late 1800s. Recently Tim Pringle, as the Foundation's Director of Special Programs, has been involved in a research project on large scale developments in this region. He talks to CITinfoResource about this research and its significance for communities in the region.

Please share these resources
A lot of you are telling us that what we do at CITinfoResource is useful. We encourage you to leave comments on the various posts or on Facebook. We also want to encourage you to reproduce and/or otherwise circulate what we've put together.

Collaboration and sharing of resources are keys to the success of both the Real Estate Foundation of BC and of the many projects and organizations that have received Foundation support over 22+ years. The reproduction of CIT Information Resource articles and materials for non-profit educational purposes is an extension of this approach. In return, we ask that you please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses. You may also want to follow us on Facebook or on Twitter.

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©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses

Where is BC's Rural Development Policy?

by George Penfold

In my role as Regional Innovation Chair at Selkirk College, I have the opportunity to participate in many great workshops and conferences. Two recent events stand out – the Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George in October 2008, and more recently the OECD conference in Quebec City in October 2009. Both were on the theme of rural development and revitalization. What stood out at both events was the strong emphasis that all other Canadian provinces and other OECD countries place on rural issues and rural development compared to the province of BC.

The Quebec example

In Canada for example, Quebec has a "national" policy that says that the province wants

• strong rural areas,
• to ensure the survival of rural communities and identity, and
• to rethink ways of building on the extensive development potential of rural areas, all in a sustainable way.

These sentiments are backed up with a signed formal rural partnership agreement between the province, municipal organizations, and two province-wide rural interest groups. As all provincial parties have agreed, this partnership agreement will be sustained even if government changes. The main outcome of the Quebec rural partnership is a dedicated funding portfolio. Implementation happens through a regional priority setting and planning process, which in turn leads to a long-term funding agreement between the region and the province. They work with 7 year program time frames and provide support for management of implementation.

This is quite different from what rural interest groups have to deal with in BC. The typical scenario here is a project-by-project pursuit of funding, trying to access federal and provincial programs that seem to be in perpetual motion in terms of priorities, administrative structures, and funding for rural development.

International examples

An international example comes from Scotland. In 1965 the Scots decided to improve social and economic conditions in rural Scotland and to enable rural areas to play a more effective role in national development. They established and funded two regional development boards. In 1991, the development board in Northern Scotland evolved into Highlands and Islands Enterprise. It serves just over 440,000 people and has a budget of approximately $180 million annually. Their current focus is on:

• supporting high-growth businesses and sectors (thereby raising growth rates across the area)
  
• creating the infrastructure and conditions to improve regional competitiveness, and
  
• strengthening fragile communities in the region.

To address these goals, Highlands and Island Enterprise (HIE) aims to establish 500 or so business relationships by 2011. These relationships will help businesses develop and implement a growth plan that can be assisted with HIE financial support. In response to the infrastructure objective, HIE has invested in:

• wind turbine manufacturing and a related marine energy centre,
• centres for health science and marine science, and
• a new centre for creative and cultural industries on the Isle of Skye.

To strengthen fragile communities, the emphasis is on:

• investment in social enterprise,
• the acquisition and development of income-generating assets,
• building community capacity, and
• stimulating growth.

Another international example comes from Finland, which established (by legislation) a Rural Policy Committee (RPC). The Fins recently announced an objective of developing 100mbps internet access throughout the country. Compare this to BC, where most of our rural areas have – at best – 10mbps service, with some communities still on dial-up.A significant common theme in these examples is a strong national or “upper tier” government statement about the importance of rural regions to the future development of the province or country, and a strong regional development focus along with local development initiatives.

In BC we have no clear statement about the importance of rural BC to the future of the province. We do have the provincial regional trusts (such as the Columbia Basin Trust in the Kootenays and Northern Development Initiatives Trust in the north), and various federal programs (through Western Economic Diversification for example), but these initiatives tend to focus on specific projects, mostly at the local level. We have few regional development organizations, policies, management capacity, or investment dealing with the “big picture” or the types of regional needs and opportunities that are being addressed in Scotland for example. Victor Cumming, Vernon's resident economic development sage, talked about what this could look like here in BC in his conversations with CITinfoResource last year [see CITinfoResource interviews of March 2009 and June 2009].

What do we want for rural BC?

Rural BC also needs to be clear about what it wants. We do have history in BC with regional development in terms of delivery of provincial programs, but little history with regionally managed development initiatives. We've either been too focussed on "local", or not committed enough to make regional initiatives work, or not bold enough to allow real investment in the future. To some extent then, we have what we thought we wanted.

For most of rural BC, what we have is a piecemeal strategy of rural development with local and municipal focus. Rural communities have generally not fared well over the last 2 decades with this approach. Our strategy seems to lack any real rural focus, and has resulted in provincially uneven development. Do we want to continue with this lack luster rural focus and resulting imbalance into the "teen" decade? Is there a willingness within "upper tiers" of government to take the initiative? Is there sufficient desire at at the grassroots and at the local and regional leadership levels to follow the lead of other provinces and other countries to make long-term, systemic investment for rural – and provincial – economic success?

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About the author:

GEORGE PENFOLD is the Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC and Adjunct Professor at the School of Business and Economics at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. In 2005 the Real Estate Foundation of BC contributed $100,000 to the RIC endowment fund at Selkirk College as part of its support for sustainable community planning and informed development in the greater Kootenay region. George is a regular contributor to CITinfoResource.com.

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.

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