In Conversation with Tim Pringle about the May 2009 Northern Sustainability Summit: Rural Revitalization in BC's North

by hans peter meyer

Tim Pringle is the Director of Special Programs at the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Tim was in Smithers, BC on May 28-29, 2009 for the Northern Sustainability Summit: Our Communities, Our Future. The Summit was hosted by the Town of Smithers, with support and sponsorship of a wide range of organizations, including the Real Estate Foundation of BC. The event attracted 88 registered attendees from across the north, from the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii to Prince George. I interviewed Tim shortly after his return from several days in the Smithers region.

hpm: What was the purpose of the Northern Sustainability Summit?

Tim: It was organized as a way to engage leadership of that region from the perspective of how they could implement strategies to help them with the transitions they’re experiencing, socially and economically.

hpm: What are some of these transitions?

Tim: This area of BC has been stable or declining since at least the mid-90s. By one measure – population change – there have been some ups and some downs, but overall it’s been stagnation or decline. Whatever recent building and development activity that has occurred is due to demographic change: The population is aging; household sizes are getting smaller. There is also a rise in “mailbox incomes” – investments and pensions. This indicates not just aging, but also the likelihood of households relocating within or into the region who don’t need a job. That’s not to say there aren’t entrepreneurs or others who come into the region.

There is a subgroup within the region that is growing, the aboriginal population which makes up about 20% of the total population. They have a positive birth rate. From a housing and land development perspective, the impact of this growth is hard to see as this population is traditionally scattered rurally. We are, however, seeing more aboriginal persons relocating to the market towns of the region. These would be Prince George in the south, and Smithers, Terrace, and Prince Rupert to the north and west. It’s in these centres that we find greater diversity of housing types. You’re not going to find condos in the rural areas, for example. You might find a duplex here or there, but you’re not going to find multiple unit developments. These will be in the larger centres.

This begins to paint a picture for certain kinds of migration. Elderly people who no longer want to maintain a single family dwelling (SFD) will migrate to the centres where there are more housing options. It's part of a range of changes going on that are not unlike those facing non-metropolitan areas in southern BC.

hpm: Why has this region experienced population decline?

Tim: The economy of the region is primarily built on resource extraction, which is subject to world markets. We all know about the softwood tension, how BC is affected by that tension with the US. The impact of the mountain pine beetle is starting to be felt, and it will be a long term impact. In the short term, of course, there has been some increased harvesting activity. But in the long term there will be less fibre available. This will have an impact on the manufacturing in the region. Mining can be a strong employer, but it’s cyclical. Minerals have been strong, but have recently weakened. Communities in this region are therefore looking for a strategy that is more “place-based.” They’re planning for future well-being based on the kinds of assets and skill sets they have. They’re asking, How can we attract new households? How can we build on what we have? Framing these questions is, to a great extent, what the Northern Sustainability Summit was all about.

hpm: Why is the Real Estate Foundation involved in this kind of an event?

Tim: I'll give you some background. Land use and housing issues are a primary concern for the Foundation. As I've mentioned in an interview on the REIBC research on northern housing issues, retaining and attracting households has a significant economic multiplier effect in communities. It also has an impact on the social heritage or social capital assets in a community. From a real estate industry perspective, these contribute to community quality of life. In 2004 the Foundation launched the Communities in Transition (CIT) as a way to look at these and related "transition" issues. Our focus with CIT is on the non-metropolitan areas of BC.

This Northern Sustainability Summit was one of a number of projects we’ve been involved in over the years through CIT. Specifically, it is part of a series of community and regional forums that are part of a larger project looking at integrated sustainability planning and rural revitalization in north-central and north-west BC. It includes some housing research recently completed for the Real Estate Institute of BC, case studies of rural development projects that have been in operation for a number of years in Scotland, Maine, and Kentucky. It also involved the large regional conference that took place in Prince George in October of 2008, Reversing the Tide. The Smithers event is one of a series of events following up on Reversing the Tide. Others have been held in Barriere in the North Thompson area, in Clinton, Kamloops, and then Cranbrook. All of this has occurred in the context of this larger project that the Real Estate Foundation has been involved in.


hpm: You said you’ve already had some feedback about the conference. What are people saying?

Tim: Responses from attendees’ evaluation form were almost all “good” or “excellent.” One telling remark came from Nathan Cullen, the MP for the area. He was the closing speaker for the conference. Cullen acknowledged and understood the need for a regional approach to the issues. He was impressed by the number and range of sponsors for the conference – this included local governments, provincial ministries, private sector interests, financial institutions, among others. He said that the program was excellent, and he supported the notion that communities in the North have the expertise and the ability to “reinvent” themselves - not his word - that in the conference room there was the confidence to get through the challenges facing the region, that have stymied them in the past.

As well, there is a group that has been active for some time on these issues in the Prince Rupert-Queen Charlotte area. Members of this group participated in the Summit, and reported back positively about how helpful the event information was, and also about the quality of the contacts they made. They found David Beurle, a consultant from Australia, particularly helpful. They’re already working on a larger regional approach, as opposed to a community or sub-regional approach [editor's note: see CIT interview with Victor Cumming on limits to community and sub-regional econ deve approaches], so their activities, while not a direct result of the Summmit, are in line with kinds of things the Summit was proposing. It’s good to see this kind of quick application of the Summit’s outcomes.

There were two speakers who stood out for me. One is Kim Fowler. She’s an experienced planner and has been working for some time as a consultant, helping communities with their sustainability planning and strategies. She’s worked for Victoria and Port Coquitlam. In Pt. Coquitlam she developed an extensive “sustainability check-list.” At the conference she provided a very practical, applied perspective on what tools and policies local governments can use to become more sustainable.

The other speaker who stood out was David Beurle. He’s very experienced in working with rural communities, looking at what their assets are, what their landscapes and people have to offer. His interest is in using these assets as levers for revitalization. David has developed “The Futures Game” to help in this work. We “played” the game in the last afternoon of the conference. Table-teams are given information about the landscape – at the summit David used a case from Southwestern Australia as an example. Teams are given the characteristics of the landscape and a card with events at specific updates over a span of 20 years or so, starting in 2008 with updates at 2012, 2020 and again at 2030. Table-teams make decisions based on each set of information, but not knowing what the next set of cards describes. So they make decisions based on the 2008 information, and then are given the 2012 information, and so on. At the end, the tables see what the decision-tree looks like, at the kinds of things they might have accomplished if they’d made different decisions. The endpoint or end analysis has the table-teams assess whether they gained or lost population, whether the landscape is healthier or more degraded, what happened with the economy – those kinds of things.

hpm: This sounds fascinating, very engaging.

Tim: Yes, it is. And it’s easy to do. Very intuitive to people. It’s what you’d be doing around the kitchen table or in a local government context if you were worried about your future.

hpm: This sounds like a fun way to engage people if your community is doing a Regional Growth Strategy or a Sustainability Plan.

Tim: Yes, it would be. It makes sense to everybody. The thing is that you’d have to do a lot of work, assembling the data, before you could run it in a community. The game needs intelligent information to work properly.

hpm: Anything you’d like to add about where the conference might go?

Tim: I think it was very successful in helping people understand their own capacity for self-determination. I’ve noticed over the years, and this is a good example, that there is less expectation that a senior level of government will be able to come in and “solve” things. Instead, I’m seeing communities saying, “We need to do this, and if we need senior levels of government to make policy changes, we’ll work on that. In the meantime, lets work with what we’ve got.” This can include existing provincial or federal programs that can be accessed for funding. There are some regional organizations in place for this. The Northern Development Trust, for example. This is a fund that supports community economic development, although it’s broader than just CED. There’s also the Nechako-Kitimat Development Fund. These are all examples of sources of funding that can be used for certain kinds of projects. And they’re locally based. What impressed me....I liked the emphasis on self-determination.

– 30 –

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2009. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.