In the past four decades, rural Canada has been kind to the Progressive Conservative Party. Since John Diefenbaker turned the Prairies from Liberal red to Tory blue in the companion campaigns of 1957 and 1958, rural constituencies have represented the bulk of Tory seats in the House of Commons.
Of course, 1993 broke that pattern, along with most other Canadian political patterns. The Tories now are Canada’s first totally urban party in the Commons. Both of their MPs represent cities.
Still, Conservatives have been the modern-day party of rural Canada. Agree with them or not, they have repaid the compliment by taking seriously the need for policies that reflect rural sensibilities.
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So what are rural Canadians to make of the recent Tory “rebuilding” convention?
It took place in the midst of turbulent agricultural times. The Canadian Wheat Board is under siege, supply management is under attack, government support is being cut and the rules of the food-producing game are being rewritten.
It took place in Winnipeg, the historic centre of the grain trade.
It took place just a year before the next election in which more than 100 rural seats once held by the Tories will be up for grabs.
Yet there was barely a recognition from the delegates that there is space out there between the cities, that there is a food industry sustaining 1.8 million jobs and several hundred thousand farm families, that agriculture will remain one of the fundamental economic and social communities in 21st Century Canada.
The sole mention came in a throw-away policy line that marketing boards are a trade barrier that reduce competitiveness.
Does the party of 1996 still believe, as its predecessors did, that farmers should have the right to organize themselves for market power? Who knows?
Does the party imagine agriculture to be an integral part of a modern Canadian economy and society, or merely a vestige of an earlier time when government support and regulation were in vogue? It is anyone’s guess.
Tory leader Jean Charest deflected questions about such “regional” issues by saying he had a national vision, not a vision for Quebec or the West.
Agriculture is a regional issue? That should be news to former agriculture ministers Alvin Hamilton, Don Mazankowski and Charlie Mayer, who were at the convention and represent Tory agricultural thinking from the 1950s through the 1980s.
When they occupied the corner office at the Sir John Carling building in Ottawa, they probably did not realize all those national policies really were just responses to regional concerns.
Of course, when the election campaign begins, an election platform will contain a nod to rural issues and Tory candidates will conjure up some agricultural policies.
Still, they will not be based on the will of the party’s soul-defining policy convention.
Does this sound like a party that remembers where it came from, or appreciates or understands the Canada which exists outside the boundaries of Sherbrooke or the suburbs of Toronto?
Send Alvin Hamilton a sympathy card.
