It's absolutely crucial for the survival and prospering of rural regions. My focus has been water, so we look at irrigation, drinking water supplies or groundwater, but also agricultural practices that can better manage water and ways to harvest water, in unique methods.
The communities benefit substantially from this when they have a better means to their economy, when their ecosystems can remain intact. So many people in rural Canada, from indigenous to others, will have a lifestyle that involves hunting and fishing, as well as appreciation of nature. That's also critically important for these areas and it's something that gets forgotten sometimes.
We see it now with the pandemic, the exodus of people from the cities to our rural regions. We want to make sure that these are welcoming places, that these are sustainable communities that can help build the rest of this century and the country. Not everything will be occurring in the large cities.
The innovation of rural residents is something well known in Saskatchewan. I've always felt that the best graduate student in the world was a Saskatchewan farm child who knew how to fix things on the farm and could do the same in the Arctic or in a laboratory or elsewhere.
There's a wealth of capacity that comes from rural Canada that will be crucial for our science moving forward.