IT’S TIME to wake up the city! The words, exclamation mark and all, were written on a note passed by Toronto-area Liberal MP Julian Reed, just after some stirring comments to the Commons agriculture committee about rural problems.
More precisely, the speech was about urban ignorance of rural problems.
Afterwards, Reed was asked if his constituents in Halton-Peel, on the western fringe of Toronto, could care less about rural problems.
Reed said they should. Urban issues such as air pollution can have rural solutions if urbanites realize that grain-based ethanol fuel can help.
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“Rural Canada has done a piss-poor job of selling itself.” And, he might have added, the city has done a poor job of listening.
On the surface, this Toronto-area MP seems like a strange candidate to be promoting the rural cause.
He is a former actor and Ontario provincial Liberal MPP. He also has been a farmer and a small-scale hydro power developer and promoter.
In a 1989 profile, his riding was described as: “Mainly residential, combination of urban/rural. High tech industries, some light to medium manufacturing, small businesses … some agriculture and horse ranching. Middle to upper income levels.”
These do not sound like voters who would appreciate their MP spending time on rural issues during the lead-up to an election. Reed’s predecessor, Conservative cabinet minister Garth Turner, was not known on Parliament Hill for his agricultural opinions.
Yet Reed has been an active member of the agriculture committee, telling everyone that the city has more of a stake in a strong rural Canada than many imagine.
“Without a vital rural Canada, there is no urban Canada,” he said during his mid-December comments.
Reed drew smiles with a scathing verbal portrait of “a 24-year-old kid who’s on Bay Street with his red suspenders, and who has been described as never having read a book, dabbling in commodity futures, down there on Monday morning. The fact is, if he’s looking at corn futures, there had better be a bushel of corn out there.”
That commodity trader drove downtown in a car made from and fuelled by products taken from rural Canada, will eat his meals on food grown in rural Canada and if he goes for drinks after work, will be consuming alcohol created from farm products.
Rural Canada needs “a champion” in government to keep reminding urbanites in cabinets and bureaucracies about the modern rural reality, he said.
Later, Reed recalled how urban stereotypes about rural Canadians once affected his acting career.
At the time, he was an actor with a farm operation on the side. One day, his agent called to say an advertisement was being filmed and they needed an actor to play a farmer. This would be easy. Reed WAS a farmer.
He lost the part to an urban actor who showed up in coveralls, with a straw in his mouth.
“Guess I just didn’t know what a farmer looks like,” Reed laughs now.
At the time of less frequent paycheques, it wasn’t so funny.
