Managing Emergencies in Rural Communities – Lessons from Northern Ontario

By Amanda Mongeon, PhD Candidate and CHASE Board Member, October 2024

Rural communities are often on the front lines of wildfires, extreme weather and resulting social impacts of climate change. In Canada, people living in rural areas face unique challenges, like lower access to health care, transportation barriers, and poor communications infrastructure. While higher rates of social cohesion can somewhat buffer these challenges, the capacity to address these factors is often limited—as is the capacity to respond to emergencies and their aftermath. Climate change is driving an increase in both frequency and severity of these disruptions, so we need to invest in the steps to equip rural communities to anticipate and mitigate their impacts.

Researchers at the Universities of Guelph and Toronto explored the experience of Northern Ontario communities with the COVID-19 pandemic to consider how to reduce the impacts of future disruptions for these places and the people who live here. In essence, the researchers applied a health and wellbeing lens to rural emergency management.

Key learnings:

• Rural communities are part of larger systems (e.g., governance systems, economic systems, ecological systems). In other words, rural decision-makers need to react to things that feel beyond their control. However, by working with higher levels of government, rural communities can give voice to local issues and the local impacts of decisions made beyond local borders.
• There are real opportunities to strengthen emergency management (which includes prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery) through clarity of roles, shared understanding of each phase, and balanced investment across phases. There is need to give less priority to emergency preparedness and response, and greater priority to the prevention and mitigation of risks that are having significant impacts on the health of the population.
• Rural communities need a rural version of emergency management that accounts for their social, governance, and physical/geographical contexts. This is a challenge when policies often originate in urban settings.
• In rural communities, individuals often wear multiple hats, so individual characteristics—like leadership qualities, ideology, and health knowledge—can impact how and what things happen.

Funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), this study has been captured in a new report, Lesson from Northern Ontario: Lessons from Northern Ontario: Rural-proofing emergency management in Canada.  Prepared by Amanda Mongeon, Dr. Leith Deacon, and Dr. Kate Mulligan, it was released in October 2024, along with a policy brief that provides recommendations for public health decision-makers, governments at all levels, and rural communities.

The recommendations address the need to build clarity in emergency management, update tools and resources to be more compatible with the realities of rural life and the realities of emergencies that have lasting impacts and affect people inequitably, better support rural communities to thrive (better implement all we know in health promotion, asset-based approaches, Indigenous approaches), and encourage a more whole-of-society approach (in rural communities, we all have a lot to offer).

This research offers important insights for those working to address climate change and protect public health. First, recognize that there is an existing emergency management framework, with buy-in and legitimacy, that is being under-utilized. With fuller implementation, this framework could be used to address factors making climate change worse and adaptations to mitigate its impacts. Second, there is a need to apply a rural lens to all issues being discussed.

CHASE has taken steps to include rural case studies in its report, Climate Change, Population Health and Health Equity, and with case studies directed at rural Haliburton, small-town British Columbia, rural Nova Scotia, Cowichan Valley, British Columbia, Vancouver Island and Simcoe-Muskoka District in Ontario. Some of these case studies align with recommendations in the new report.