THE RESURGENCE OF RURAL CANADA

 Rural residents know water, forests and rocks are quintessentially Canadian and their abundance means they can be exploited for our collective benefit. Anyone who worries Canada will ever run out of them has never flown over or driven through the Canadian Shield. The overly-protective and economically-damaging attitude of city-dwellers who want to preserve every living thing is exemplified by the hysteria that greeted a plan by Longueuil, Que., to cull an over-abundant deer population. The reality is rural residents understand the poet Alfred Tennyson was right to describe nature as “red in tooth and claw.”