I feel like you have a misunderstanding about how the produce industry works.

We get the mass prod, mass sold, 7 dollars a cauliflower bullshit, and pay twice that if we want organic.

You get the exact same stuff we rural people get, at pretty much the same price. Sure, if you live in Vancouver it might be a tad more expensive, but there is little variation in produce prices from a rural store to an urban one. (I say this as the manager of a produce department who visits a lot of grocery stores out of curiosity.) The $7 cauliflower has become a cliche and I can guarantee if you go down to your local store right now it will not be anywhere near that expensive. That was a supply shortage that was hitting all of Canada, it was the same situation here as wherever you are. And the idea that remote areas get cheaper produce is inane; go to a small town in say, NWT and have a look around. People are paying the price for that remote lifestyle.

I'd also add that we can literally ship food healthy from almost anywhere now, so a lot of that could be consolidated. We also could easily build greenhouses to feed everyone, and it would be more cost effective than delivering high speed FTTH internet to every farmer out there in the sticks.

To address that point, I am not sure what you mean by ship food from almost anywhere. Are you saying we should stop growing apples in the Okanagan because we can just as easily import them from the US? Or are you suggesting that we grow apples in greenhouses? Either way, that doesn't make any sense. The stuff that is grown in greenhouses is not the same stuff that is grown on farms. By all means, in the summer most of the tomatoes and cucumbers come from greenhouses, but there is a reason you never see greenhouse potatoes.

Believe me, I absolutely agree that living in a city is a better idea at this point, if only from an environmental perspective. And I do think that there are certain things you have to give up living in a rural area. But there will always be some need for rural centres. And by the way, your characterization of rural areas as economically depressed dumps with whiny welfare folks is not completely wrong. But there are some people like myself who are steadily employed, draw very little from the system, and don't necessarily have all of the freedom in the world to choose where we live, because we are anchored by one thing or another.