The problem here is that communities die out if their services are taken away. Being from the North I've seen the vast difference between communities that lose services (often purely due to government structure and political machinations/clout) and communities that don't. Once a small town in the North loses its public school not a single person with kids is going to be willing to move there, and within 20 years they are a glorified senior home. Yet school boards in the North have spent 30 years closing rural schools and busing kids into centers like Sudbury. When I went to high school I would spend over an hour on the school bus -- each way.
And at the other end, lots of seniors in the North end up relocating to places like Sudbury so they can access transit to get around, but this can be a traumatic experience for people who have spent 50 or 60 years in the same small community with people they know, and it can often take away unofficial community support networks even if it gets them better access to official ones. But the alternative for many of them is lack of access to medical care -- which is a serious problem in the North that's acknowledged by all levels of government and the media, and there's been decades of discourse about it with towns paying doctors tens of thousands of dollars to get them to sign 3 or 5 year contracts to stay.
Cuts to services, inconsistent services, and situations like this where a service gets implemented and then taken away again without a clear substitute, are an existential threat to Northern communities -- which have a fundamental right to exist and receive services, and it is the duty and obligation of all levels of government to provide these services. 30 years ago many towns in the North had passenger rail that now don't even have bus service. Outside of North America and especially in Europe, I don't think you would find quite as many people questioning the dollar value of providing rural services, and it would be talked about more correctly in a framework of cuts and government austerity, which is the elephant in the room here. If Ontario Northland wasn't constantly being faced with funding cuts and threats of privatization from both Liberals and Conservatives for absolutely no reason other than lack of regard for the North and the belief that privatization would have no significant political blowback for the province, they would be able to actually commit to serving regions like Manitoulin and the North Shore, as the people running the agency clearly wish they could. Then people would have time to get used to these routes existing and be more inclined to rely on them.
www.mykapuskasingnow.com
