‘Back to the Future’ Leadership

Thanks to the visionary, courageous leaders in the town and four districts of the rural municipality, the Saltcoats Rural Telephone Company was established in 1908. The telephone exchange (think, Lily Tomlin in Laugh-in) was in the town of Saltcoats, but 240+ kilometers of telephone line was hand-built in a cloverleaf winding through the countryside, enabling farmers to transact with business in the town. In its time, the facilities were equal to very much larger urban centres and cities. Many believe that the telephone company was a significant reason that Saltcoats became a leading market area, a trading hub that lasted for decades.[2]

Market area economies also thrived when railways and major highways went through. We are aware of communities without railways or major highways diminished over time. But we forget that it was the innovation, the vision, the motivation, the cooperation of ordinary people, local community leaders that leveraged the infrastructure to enable their communities to prosper and grow.

Times changed and in the later half of the 20th century, health care, telephones, electricity, roadways gradually moved away from community centric to centralized – primarily to take advantage of economies of scale, lower costs, higher reliability. And unfortunately, with that shift to centralization, an attitude that ‘they’ will look after our interests seemed to emerge.

It is interesting that in the 21st century and the digital economy with the advent of new technologies and innovations, many services are once again become decentralized to meet the needs of the citizens. We will address this and the implications in a subsequent blog.

Today, the essential infrastructure is broadband. Access to abundant and affordable broadband does not guarantee that rural Saskatchewan will survive and thrive. But it is almost guaranteed that rural Saskatchewan will not survive without broadband.

Perhaps this is our ‘back to the future’ moment. The attitude that ‘they’, and ‘they alone’ will ensure our success is not beneficial nor productive. Instead, we need to look back to the future. To look through the lens of our pioneers, the grassroots community leaders who built our province a century ago. For them, and now for us, words like vision, collaboration, innovation, cooperation, and leadership are action words.

The ‘they’ now becomes ‘we’. We are the new pioneers. Today we work with and support our elected officials and collectively, we are the grassroots community leaders. It is ‘we’ who are going to lead, to address the challenges, to move things forward and most importantly, to ensure our own future success. Let’s now lead the development of broadband infrastructure in our rural communities and market areas.