A diminished band of rural Liberal MPs gathered on Parliament Hill last week for the first time since the June 28 election that sharply reduced Liberal support in rural Canada.
They agreed that in an urban-dominated minority Liberal government that claims cities, health care and education as its priorities, they have their work cut out to keep the government aware of rural issues.
“If we continue to pour all our attention into big cities, it will be to the detriment of rural Canada and the government must be made aware of that,” said New Brunswick MP and rural caucus chair Charles Hubbard.
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The rural MPs met early Aug. 25 before the national Liberal caucus met for the first time since voters chastised the party into a minority government.
The rural MPs talked about four basic problems: the need for government action on a BSE plan; the danger to agricultural marketing boards in a recent World Trade Organization framework agreement; the impact on rural areas of a union strike against Parks Canada and a potential September strike against the Canadian Food Inspection Agency; and the need for rural health issues to be part of the national federal-provincial negotiation over medicare.
But a political question that lingered beneath the policy discussions was why rural Quebec and Ontario voters turned so decisively against the Liberals. In Ontario, most of the 24 seats that voted Conservative were rural and in Quebec, the Bloc Québecois almost shut the Liberals out of rural areas.
“That’s an issue we’ll have to look at,” said Hubbard. “We definitely lost a lot of good people who worked hard for rural Canada and on rural issues. We certainly will miss them.”
He mentioned Susan Whelan, Bob Speller, Murray Calder and Larry McCormick among the missing.
Hubbard already has some ideas about what happened.
Fiscally conservative rural voters were angry over reports of squandered advertising money.
“Even Paul’s (prime minister Paul Martin) assertion that he knew nothing wasn’t believable to some.
“There also were issues that mean more in small towns and rural areas than in larger centres, same sex marriage being one and gun control,” he said. “And a lot of good Liberals just sat on their hands.”
The danger facing the Liberals is that reduced rural representation will mean less attention to rural issues and therefore less reason for rural voters to support the Liberals in the next election.
As the party has found in Western Canada, voter rejection can lead to government indifference, which leads to greater voter rejection.
In cabinet, the number of ministers with rural or agricultural backgrounds has fallen from six to three under Martin.
