Rural Routes Podcast was a podcasts series on rural issues I published while working at the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It asked “What is rural in the 21st century?” The podcast was born out of a conversation with my friend Dr. Ryan Gibson after a Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation conference gathering on PEI. Rebecca Cohoe from Memorial’s Office of Public Engagement who grew up on a rural route named the show and later joined as a co-host and a producer. With the closure of the centre, the university stopped paying the hosting fees and the episodes disappeared from the podcast feed. I was able to salvage all of the episodes with the help of Barry Rooke from the National Community and Campus Radio Association and they are published here as an archive.
This week on Rural Routes, my guest is Bill Reimer. You could think of him as one of the wise on the Grand Rural Council if such a thing existed. Our conversation spanned decades of Dr. Reimer’s quest for finding better and smarter ways of thinking about and working with rural regions. We discussed rural policy in Quebec and Norway as well as intriguing approaches to rural and community development emerging among Canada’s First Nations.