Behind the Lines - April 2016

Friday, April 8, 2016

Feel that you aren't getting police protection at your home and farm? You are probably right and there's science to prove it, as field editor Mary Baxter writes in this issue's cover story about rural crime.

Police presence in rural areas is dwindling. Between 1998 and 2005, there was a 26 per cent decrease in local police services in rural and small town Canada, according to a 2011 essay authored by Joe Donnermeyer, a world-renowned specialist in rural crime and professor emeritus, environmental social sciences, at Ohio State University School of Environment and Natural Resources, and two other criminologists.

"In fact, most rural and small towns are now serviced by police agencies located within a 30-minute drive," the essay says. "This makes it less likely that crime in rural places, and especially domestic crimes, will be reported or policed."

During the same time period, Statistics Canada data show the province's non-metro population grew marginally at an average rate of less than one per cent a year.

As well, the Ontario Provincial Police, which serves most of rural Ontario, has scrapped its rural agriculture crime team, a specialized regional unit that had been active in the early to mid-2000s. OPP spokesman Sgt. Peter Leon says the team has "evolved into other specialized investigative units" and its expertise remains, perhaps not under "that title any longer, but they do exist in other forms within the regional crime structure."

Vankleek Hill's Kevin Wilson, featured on our cover, runs a grain elevator that was vandalized. It's not too far from one of Better Farming's offices. In fact, managing editor Robert Irwin, who sidelines with a small cash crop operation nearby, has sold grain to Wilson in the past and knows how hard the Wilsons have worked to build their farm over several generations. Police may not have had much luck finding the perpetrator, but many people in the small community nestled between Ottawa and Montreal think they know who is responsible and, guilty or not, that individual will have to cope with the social pressure that small communities are so effective at serving up.

That much misused term 'sustainability' is coming hard and fast to Ontario agriculture. Senior editor Don Stoneman lays out what sustainability really means to the farmers. It's not as bad as you think, if existing programs can be made to mesh. That story starts on page 24. At our presstime, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association announced that the winner of its 2016 Beef Industry Innovation and Sustainability Award was the Ontario Cattle Feeders Association's Cornfed Beef Program, a success story started in 2000 by executive director Jim Clark, who created buzz years before 'sustainability' was a buzz word. BF

ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN