Rural voters across Canada continued to turn the porch lights out on the Liberal party in the Oct. 14 election.
As it has in elections over the past decade, the Liberal rural caucus contracted last week as rural incumbents in almost a dozen ridings fell to Conservative or New Democratic Party opponents.
The party forfeited its last Ontario agricultural rural redoubt when it lost the Huron-Bruce riding held since 1993 by Paul Steckle.
In the Algoma region of northern Ontario, Conservatives claimed a seat that had been Liberal since 1935 including a 19-year stint by former prime minister Lester Pearson. In the Prince Edward Island seat of Egmont, held since 1988 by the Liberals, a Conservative triumphed.
Read Also
University of Saskatchewan experts helping ‘herders’ in Mongolia
The Canadian government and the University of Saskatchewan are part of a $10 million project trying to help Mongolian farmers modernize their practices.
In the rural Miramichi area of New Brunswick, former House of Commons agriculture committee chair Charles Hubbard lost a seat that had been Liberal with few breaks for more than 70 years.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives maintained their stranglehold on rural seats established in earlier elections in Ontario and on the Prairies.
“There obviously is a kind of cultural comfort in rural Canada with the Conservatives,” said Roger Epp, dean of the Camrose, Alta., Augustana campus of the University of Alberta. “On the other side, there is a clear disconnect between Liberals and rural Canada.”
At the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, political scientist Paul Thomas said the Liberals have increasingly become the party of cosmopolitan Canada.
“In a caucus dominated by urban MPs, rural issues have tended to get short shrift,” he said Oct. 17. “In terms of the inner circle and the balance of power in caucus, the emphasis is urban.”
That can become a vicious circle – urban dominance means less attention to and understanding of rural issues and therefore less appeal to rural voters.
Thomas said it is unusual that despite its lack of electoral success on the Prairies, the Liberal party continues to develop and argue for rural prairie issues.
“They have been shut out politically and yet they continue to invest political capital in prairie issues like the Canadian Wheat Board,” he said. “It is quite remarkable.”
P.E.I. Liberal Wayne Easter, the former National Farmers Union president who won his sixth term as an MP Oct. 14 in a closely contested race, knows all about it.
“I have invested a lot of political capital in issues like the wheat board. I have been criticized in my riding for it and there really has been no political payback and it is frustrating,” he said Oct. 16. “But you have to keep in mind rural prairie ridings are not just farmers.”
Still, a mid-campaign opinion poll by Ipsos Forward Research said farmers across the Prairies were planning to vote Conservative in overwhelming numbers.
Easter said he has been arguing for years within the party that there is a disconnect between the Liberals and rural Canadian interests. It is in part the result of a lack of rural connection among the key figures at the centre of Liberal party policy and strategy planning.
In the just-concluded election campaign, the party’s emphasis on the Green Shift policy of higher taxes on carbon users was a major problem for rural candidates.
“The Conservatives were able to message this as a tax and the fact that there were rural rebates and benefits included got lost in the noise,” he said. “I think in this election we began to develop policies that were sensitive to rural issues but it really did get overlooked.”
He said he was one of the Liberals who urged leader Stéphane Dion and his advisers to emphasize the economy and move away from stressing the complicated and controversial environmental plan.
“But Mr. Dion’s view was that good policy will trump bad politics,” said Easter. “We now know the answer to that question.”
He predicted that farmers will come to regret their overwhelming support for the Conservatives.
“They now have a second chance to view what the Conservatives will do for rural Canada and I think they will be disappointed,” he said.
“I think after this term, rural Canadians will wonder what they did to themselves by supporting the Conservatives and will be looking for another choice.”
