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.
For many Canadians, especially in rural areas, long distance commuting for work, often in natural resources extraction industries, is a fact of life. The income those workers bring back to their hometowns often keeps those communities going, but there is a price to pay.The families of the long distance workers often pay that price. That’s what we are looking into in the first episode of Season 3 of Rural Routes.