HERE is a little secret from the Western Producer archives.
For a number of years, tacked on the wall in the Producer Ottawa office was a photograph of Saskatchewan Liberal strongman Ralph Goodale wearing a hairnet.
It was one of many photos from a southern Ontario tour in 1996 that saw Goodale as agriculture minister tour food plants where hairnets were required and visit farms where farmer hats were expected.
The photo, printed in the Producer, came to mind recently when Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe was considering abandoning federal politics to lead the Parti Québécois.
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Invariably, it was noted that while Duceppe is now the most popular separatist politician in Quebec, he had a rocky start in his first election campaign as leader in 1997.
His political sin? Duceppe was photographed during the 1997 campaign wearing a hairnet as he toured a cheese factory.
Media pounced. Doesn’t he know how ridiculous that looks?
Cartoonists loved it. Even this month, as he wrestled with a decision about whether to abandon a safe seat in Parliament for the more risky perch as Quebec-president-in-waiting, cartoonists couldn’t resist drawing him with a hairnet and ascribing to him bad puns about his chance to become “the big cheese.”
Cheap puns aside, the uproar over Duceppe’s head gear always said more about the urban bias of media than about his political judgment.
In truth, hundreds of thousands of Canadians in the food industry wear a hairnet every day as a requirement of the job and undoubtedly saw nothing comic in the photo. Rural workers in the industry, and the rural reporters who cover them, consider it normal.
But for most reporters covering politics, that sort of headgear display is just so yesterday. Prime minister Paul Martin finger painting with children at a daycare is warm. Martin wearing a farmer hat at a feedlot is “just so goofy.”
Media are far from the only culprits. It is a symptom of a much broader trend in modern federal politics, a trend to consider rural issues and realities as at best old-fashioned and at worst, irrelevant.
Rural Canada and rural issues are on the run, either dismissed as yesterday’s issues or ignored.
The federal government claims to view all issues through a “rural lens” but spends much more time promoting its “cities agenda” and recognizing urban Canada as the “engine” of the Canadian economy.
The NDP these days seems almost totally urban oriented, despite its hard-working agriculture critic Charlie Angus.
And the Conservative party, representing much of rural Canada west of Quebec, talks seriously about rural issues but really drools over the prospect of urban breakthroughs outside the Prairies.
Billions are promised for health care yet little attention is paid to rural needs.
Meanwhile, the drumbeat from economic think-tanks is that rural industries like agriculture are sinkholes for taxpayer subsidies rather than primary creators of wealth.
And every time House of Commons seats are reassigned after a census, rural Canada has fewer. Population shifts dictate it.
Political rhetoric aside, rural issues have never been so marginalized in national politics.
Call it the hairnet syndrome.
