It was May 12, 2024 when Jessica Froese, a geography student at the University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George contacted us about a research project she was working on.
A year on, she has presented her final report to the town. While she was here, we sat down with her to find out some of the biggest findings in her study.
Not surprisingly, her supervisor for the project is Greg Halseth, who has been interested in Tumbler Ridge for the last few decades.
According to Froese, rural and small-town places across Canada have been undergoing rapid social, population, and economic changes since the early 1980s. “These changes are the product of the 1980s recession which effectively shifted government initiatives away from community-building.”
She writes that many communities in Northern BC were originally developed to house the working families of the post-war natural resource economy. “Since then, service infrastructure has aged, the original workforce is retiring, and many youth and young families have migrated out of these communities.”
At the same time, significant economic transition is occurring as the natural resource economy becomes increasingly digitalized, reducing the number of jobs. “The changing resource economy combined with an unsuitable service infrastructure has changed the nature of rural and small-town places for the young people seeking employment and quality of life within them. In addition to providing an attractive lifestyle to youth, rural communities need to foster youth’s sense of belonging, place attachment, and sense of place.”
She says this means that communities need to work on fostering positive emotional bonds between individuals and their environment. “While tangible factors, such as employment opportunities, are important drivers of youth migration, it is sense of place factors that primarily influence where youth migrate, including whether they return to their home communities. Youth that feel accepted by their community are more likely to access the resources and opportunities afforded to them, thus strengthening their community engagement to foster sense of place.”
She says one of the main narratives she wanted to address in this research is this idea that many people assume that, because there is only the mine in town, most kids are going to leave. “People think if you want to go to college, then you’re going to leave, you’re going to go to an urban centre and you’re never going to come back and that’s just the story,” she says. “And I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. Youth perspectives on good jobs and good education has changed over time, and that was one of the narratives that I wanted to address in this research.”
And what did the research show her? “I found that it’s not really economic opportunities that are pulling youth towards other places. It’s more like there are these lifestyles that they want, and they’re more interested in fitting their employment and education goals within the kind of lifestyle they want.”
That means for a lot of young people who grew up loving the lifestyle that they wind up staying. “For a lot of youth in Tumbler Ridge, they like the Northern lifestyle, they like the rural living and the fishing and the camping, and while maybe they don’t want to necessarily come back to Tumbler Ridge, they’re looking at other rural communities, they’re looking in Northern BC and Northern Alberta. Something that I heard a lot was “small towns, but not quite as small as Tumbler Ridge.”
In fact, she says, most of the youth she talked to didn’t want to go to big cities. “It definitely depends on the individual,” says Froese. “There were quite a few youth who really did connect with the kind of lifestyle in Tumbler Ridge, and some expressed a desire to return. But then there were youth that really didn’t feel like they belonged. They were the ones that want to go somewhere super different. Who said ‘I never want to come back.’ And those were the youth who self-identified as some kind of minority in the community. Maybe they were super interested in technology or like the arts. And they didn’t feel represented in the community and so they said they were going to Vancouver or Kelowna, and never coming back to a place like this.
“That sense of belonging plays a much larger role than I think we give it credit for, especially in community development. We create summer job programs and work experience, which are great, but, you can do all these things and if you feel like you don’t belong in your community, it doesn’t matter.”
She says one of the big takeaways was around housing. “That’s a really big one. Most of the kids talked about it. There’s no camps, so if there’s temporary contract workers at the coal mine, then they’re living in town and it pushes the rental market high. There’s not a lot of options for someone just out of school.
She says there’s a number of older people in the town who grew up here, then moved away, but after a number of years (ten on average), they come back. “There were a couple of youth who acknowledged that healthcare is challenging. Education is challenging, but they’re willing to trade that because of the hiking and the waterfalls and the lifestyle that they can’t get anywhere else. So even a young age there were youths who recognize that to trade off.”
Froese says Tumbler Ridge is actually doing a good job of creating opportunities for youth. “I would read a lot of the academic literature on these issues and realize Tumbler Ridge is already doing many of these things. It was really exciting to see that obviously the community cares. There are a lot of volunteers who are trying to bring arts together. There’s the young people’s drama, and there’s the Arts Council, so there are efforts happening.”
One of the things that was surprising, says Froese, was how attuned to the local issues many of the kids felt. “They had quite a breath of awareness of these issues, like, economic development. They talk so much about diversification and community planning and it was really cool to see that awareness and appreciation at that young age, because I think the perspective is often that youth don’t appreciate and youth don’t understand these issues. They’re so young, but they do know, and they can connect it to these bigger issues locally and even provincially and globally. It was really cool to just sit down with young people and have these conversations.”
Another thing that Froese found surprising was how dialed in the students were to the state of education. “The education piece was so big. It warrants its own project, for sure. The state of public education in BC was a huge topic the youth really wanted to talk about, and I didn’t expect to be talking about that. I thought we’d be talking about if they want to go to college or not and what that looks like, and they were like, no, like we need to talk about high school. We need to talk about how hard it is to keep teachers. I would love to have looked more into that. It was a much bigger deal for them than I expected it to be.”
Copies of the study are available at Town Hall.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
