A thought-provoking e-mail popped up in my mailbox in the days following the May 2 election, when the small Liberal rural contingent of MPs was made even smaller.
In response to a story that had several prominent Liberals bemoaning their lack of rural success despite having “rural-friendly policies” that were well received by farm leaders, a reader asked this question:
“I’m wondering if this is as much a comment on the farm groups as it is on the Liberal party. They relied heavily on national farm groups to craft what they thought were rural friendly policies but these were not winners in the country.”
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He ended with this: “Does the lack of acceptance of ‘rural friendly’ policies actually reflect a growing gap between the farm groups and the people they are formed to represent?”
Deputy Liberal leader Ralph Goodale ventured a little way down that path last week at a Liberal caucus meeting in Ottawa, where the lack of rural connection was discussed.
He said that the Liberal agriculture platform, including letting farmers help rewrite farm support programs, investing in agriculture and rural infrastructure and promising federal co-funding of Ontario’s risk management program, was welcomed by some rural Canadians when unveiled by the party.
“When I say rural Canada, it tends to be the heads of organizations and leading spokespersons,” he said. “We have not permeated rural Canada with the substance of the message. Our communications capacity with rural people was very small.”
So does that mean the policy demands made by mainstream farm leaders that the Liberals consulted weren’t really the issues on the minds of their farmer members?
Goodale sidestepped the question but not entirely.
“We’ve got to respect and work with the leadership of farm organizations, but we have to go beyond that,” he said. “We have to get to the farmgate and municipal offices and focus there ourselves rather than relying on third party validations.”
Ontario was a prime example during the campaign. The Liberals listened to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, which made federal support for risk management program funding the key issue.
OFA president Bette Jean Crews urged her members to vote for parties that offered supportive policies, a none-too-subtle plea to reject the only party not supporting risk management program funding — the Conservatives. The y won almost every rural agricultural seat in the province, outside of a smattering of NDP rural Ontario seats.
The Liberals were shut out. But the party has a dilemma. Without rural MPs, where does it turn for rural ideas?
The answer in recent years has been rural leaders, but Goodale now is suggesting the party must go beyond them to the farmgate and town hall to hear what rural residents really dream about and want.
But wasn’t that the purpose of farm groups and rural leadership — to develop a cadre of people who tap into rural sentiment and can articulate rural dreams to those in a position to fulfill them?
Recent Liberal experience appears to be that, electorally at least, many farm leaders do not speak for the conservative farmers on the land.
Perhaps that is the gap issue that provocative reader letter was raising.
Or maybe farmers heeded their leaders but were outvoted by the non-farm majority. Don’t bet on it.
