Article content

The long-standing notion that everyone in Saskatchewan cities is just one foot off the farm is changing.

It’s more than the changing face of cities with the arrival of new Canadians who have been driving the province’s population boom of the last decade.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or McKillop farmer/cottager conflict shows rural/urban division Back to video

What may be more intriguing is how Saskatchewan city people — many of them now generations removed from the farm if they ever had any connection to the farm at all — don’t always share rural interests, and may increasingly be coming into conflict in places where urban people co-exist with rural ones.

Consider what’s happening in the Rural Municipality of McKillop, north of Regina, where local farmers and largely urban Long Lake cottage owners are now in an acrimonious disagreement over fundamental democratic representation.

Some 400 ratepayers (mostly cottage owners attached to the 20 hamlets along Long Lake that border the RM) have petitioned for a financial and management audit of the RM council and administrator — a petition that was rejected by the RM administrator in what petitioners deem a breach of duty under The Saskatchewan Municipal Act.