Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff insists he is not a Johnnie-come-lately to the conclusion that the country needs a better rural policy.
At a party-organized roundtable discussion in Guelph, Ont., the leader said he noticed a chasm between rural and urban areas when he returned to Canada in 2005 to run for Parliament and then for Liberal leadership.
“The single issue that struck me most as I travelled back and forth seeking the leadership of the party for the first time in 2006 is the divide between rural and urban Canada and a sense that this is the undiscussed national unity challenge of our time,” Ignatieff said.
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His comments echoed those he made in early 2009 at his first news conference after being named interim Liberal leader, when he referred to time he spent on family farms in his youth and his determination to be a leader for all Canadians.
But then, except for a speech to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s annual meeting last year, his rural emphasis largely disappeared from public view.
It resurfaced in Guelph, where he listened for several hours to presentations and then offered early glimpses of Liberal rural platform planks for the next election.
“We don’t want a country in which hope and opportunity have fled to the big cities,” he said.
“We want a country where we can get access to health care in rural Canada, where you can get access to the latest technologies, broadband, cellphone coverage for rural communities, where rural businesses, forestry, mining, agriculture, are doing real well, generating wealth.”
He said rural Canadians deserve a chance to stay, raise families and prosper where they were born.
“This isn’t just a policy discussion,” he said. “This is a values discussion about what we care about most as Canadians, the things that unite us, and one of the things that unites us from all parties is a passion that this must be one country, that opportunities available to some must be available to all. I’m here because I think rural Canada has an enormous, dynamic, optimistic, hopeful future.”
