The 2008 Senate agriculture committee report was clear – rural Canada is losing its political clout.
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Despite the fact that the current Conservative government has the strongest rural contingent by percentage of any government since John Diefenbaker’s 1957 minority, rural is getting lost in the shuffle.
“With every new census, rural Canada’s place in the national fabric seems to unravel a little more,” the report said.
Someone forgot to tell the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper. It reacted to November’s House of Commons vote to approve in principle the end of the long gun registry bill as if it was new evidence that rural Canada has too much power.
“Rural over-representation defeats the people’s will,” said a headline.
“If the House of Commons were representative of the nation, the gun registry would survive,” wrote Globe columnist John Ibbitson. “The voters of greater Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver would insist on it.”
Never mind that the voting population of those three cities represents no more than 21 percent of the Canadian voting population.
There is a persistent assumption that rural voters have more clout than urban voters because rural ridings typically have fewer voters.
It is true and it is not.
Rural ridings often tend to have fewer voters than urban ridings, making rural votes worth more in theory. However, rural ridings also are much larger, making it more difficult for rural MPs to represent their voters.
And with the growth of cities, every electoral map redrawing since 1931 has added more urban seats to the House of Commons, making rural an ever-smaller minority.
Depending on the definition, because many seats are mixed rural-urban where city interests dominate, close to one-third of MPs now have significant rural constituencies. Within years, based on the last census, several dozen new seats will be added from Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, all urban or suburban.
University of Manitoba political scientist Paul Thomas said the numbers alone do not tell the story.
“It is true that rural is now outvoted in most legislatures but I think it is a myth that rural interests necessarily get short shrift because of numbers alone,” he said.
“It depends on the quality of the rural representatives and the role they are given in government. If you have areas that are under-represented, you have to work harder.”
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities makes a similar point.
Last May in a plea to Ottawa for better rural treatment, the federation argued that clout within the apparatus of government is a bigger issue than numbers. It said there should be a “rural champion” in cabinet beyond the agriculture minister, and the government should provide more funding and status to the rural secretariat.
The rural-urban political divisions are starkly represented in the House of Commons. The Conservatives hold the vast majority of rural seats with the Liberals reduced to a beachhead in Atlantic Canada. With a recent resurgence in northern Ontario, the NDP caucus is now one-third rural but still represents just a baker’s dozen of rural seats.
In Quebec, Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois split rural seats with the Conservatives gradually gaining ground.
Former Reform party leader Preston Manning said rural voter loyalty to the Conservatives may be part of the problem. They are well represented in the current government, but the Conservatives need to woo urban voters if they want a majority.
“Sometimes, you have a perverse effect if your votes are predictable,” he said. “If you have a secure base, you can ignore it, take it for granted.”
