View article

IN APRIL 1996 the Kitchener-Waterloo Record (April 9, 1996, 1-2) published a front-page article based on our research. The article faithfully reported the negative consequences suffered by many workers following plant closures in three rural communities within about 60 kilometres of Kitchener-Waterloo, and captured the pessimism we felt for the futures of rural communities that continue to place their faith in attracting a major industrial employer as a solution to local economic development problems. The response to this article by town councillors in one of the communities was swift. The Mayor's rebuttal to our points was picked up by the newspaper a few days later. Things had apparently improved vastly since our interviews with laid-off workers in the community in 1994. The town had quickly recovered from the blow of losing a major employer, and these more recent changes were not reflected in the article. In a follow-up article in the newspaper a week later (Kitchener-Waterloo Record, April 16, 1996) in which the Mayor identifies two manufacturing facilities that had located in the town since 1994, he is quoted as saying “[w] e more than made up for everything we lost." The original article was apparently on the agenda of the next meeting of the Town Council, to which we were not invited. We received phone calls from one town councillor registering the disapproval of Council, and, as he told us, of local real estate agents. During the conversation, he too, reported on the improvement in economic conditions in the town, noting as evidence of this that “a Tim Horton's [coffee and donut shop] opened here just last week." The unhappy response of …