A tisket, a tasket, a red and yellow basket. Now, I have no idea what a tisket or a tasket is, but, as a kid, I always imagined them to be some sort of yummy food. 

Now that we have had 'The Election of the Century,' it is time to consider a few things. In Canada, most people seem to live in very big cities down south and those same cities get most of the attention because that is where most of the votes and MPs are from. Unfortunately, they really don’t understand most of Canada, which we could call the hinterlands or north country, and they don’t understand the trials and tribulations of the people who live here.

Why are these small communities important? Well, they cover the other 90 percent of Canada, and their existence, in a way, gives Canada sovereignty over the area. They are also where most of our resources and wealth lie: our fishing, farming and forestry. They also have our future mines, minerals, oil and gas and our renewable and non-renewable resources. They monitor and protect the environment and because the people know the land and the climate, they provide much of our ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø workforce.

So, I think it would be a good idea to form some sort of group to investigate ways in which rural or ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø communities can be made much more attractive and viable to those who choose to live there. It should be made up of people who understand the challenges small communities face. They could come up with a framework of ideas to consider. They could examine ways to use the new technologies available and ways to review some of the old ways that made frontier life attractive.

In a small community, everyone knows everyone else and many are related. They tend to live close to the land, see wildlife every day, hunt, fish, grow some of their own food. Unfortunately, they have access to few stores and options. The government is far away, and trying to deal with them is always a chore. There are few jobs in many of the communities and trying to do anything big currently means hiring outsiders.

So how do we change this reality? A good start would be to educate the government about small communities and to get them to do things differently. The government could create several part-time jobs in the communities rather than centralizing all the jobs in the bigger centres. You could have a local wildlife officer, a government clerk, a post office and bank. Also home repair people who have some training and have good access to the internet and trades people in the big city. You could have a ham radio club, so they have communications with other towns and the outside world, even if there is a major power outage or internet failure. You could have a few part-time Rangers, search and rescue people and healthcare workers.

I was teaching a prospecting course in one of the communities. An adult student arrived rather late and a little worse for the wear. He had been in a hurry in the morning and rushed out of his house, which he had lived in and rented from the government for years. His front porch and steps were on a slant, and it had been freezing rain the night before, so he took a major fall.

Later, I looked at his porch and suggested we could get a jack-all, raise up the corner that had sunk, put a bit of blocking in and fix the problem in less than an hour. He told me that as a tenant, they weren’t allowed to do any repairs. They could be fined or even evicted if they did. Instead, they put in a request to the housing authority and waited. In his case, he had been waiting for over two years.

A bureaucrat or two in the capital kept piles of requests for repairs from all the communities. They were carefully sorted into piles for carpentry, electrical, plumbing, heating, doors and windows. When a pile got big enough, they would hire an outside contractor to go into community for a few days to make all the repairs.

That was the system, and they stuck to it. A tisket, a tasket, a red and yellow basket.