RURAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT 125 



will only come through the education of the individual, and, to a 

 large extent, that is true; but sanitary improvement in all countries 

 has required government leadership and initiative. In Canada we 

 possess useful and progressive Boards of Health in the provinces and 

 municipalities which are doing splendid work for the improvement of 

 sanitation, but they are necessarily limited in their opportunities, 

 owing to the facts that they have no control over the method of 

 planning and laying out the land; that they are not competent to 

 exercise that control if they had it; that they are largely absorbed in 

 the task of correcting evils that have been allowed to become estab- 

 lished because of the want of that control ; and that building and real 

 estate regulations are so defective and lacking in uniformity. Schemes 

 adaptable to different kinds of rural areas should be prepared, and 

 some lead given and standards created which would lay the 

 foundation, at least, for better sanitation. 



The death rate in rural districts is not so high as in urban dis- 

 tricts, but it is still far higher than it should be. The vital statistics 

 of the provinces that have grown in population as a result of immi- 

 gration cannot be relied upon as a guide to health conditions for ob- 

 vious reasons. The whole question of vital and municipal statistics 

 in Canada requires serious consideration, with a view to securing im- 

 provement. The statistics of the older provinces are, however, 

 of some value as a guide, and show that Canada is still behind older 

 countries in regard to health conditions. In 1914 the death rate of 

 Quebec was 17.02, the worst in the Dominion. The death rate in 

 the rural districts of Nova Scotia was 13.7 per 1,000, as against 18.4 

 in the urban communities. The death rate for the whole of England 

 for the same year was 14 per 1,000, and for the rural districts of Eng- 

 land was 12.63.* In the Garden City of Letchworth for 1912 the 

 death rate was only 6.1 per l,000.f Bad sanitary conditions are, of 

 course, only one of the causes which lead to a high death rate, but it 

 may fairly be claimed that it is these conditions which are chiefly 

 responsible for any inferiority of Canadian as compared with English 

 conditions. Great improvement of the sanitary conditions in Eng- 

 land began with the administration of the Public Health Acts in 1875, 

 and until we in Canada similarly improve the standards of our sani- 

 tation we are not likely to make much progress in lessening the death 

 rate or in securing the amelioration of health conditions in the rural 

 areas. In the last forty years the death rate has fallen about eight 

 per thousand in England and Wales. 



* 77th Annual Report, Registrar General, "Births, Deaths and Marriages in 

 England and Wales, 1914." f Town Planning Review, Vol. IV., page 247. 



