Early last Saturday afternoon, scores of Liberals crowded into a small room in the basement of Ottawa’s downtown Congress Centre to debate rural policy. It was the rural policy workshop at the national Liberal Party convention. An hour had been set aside.
Fifteen minutes later, without debate, four resolutions had been approved. One called on the government to encourage rural job creation, another encouraged spread of the internet in rural Canada and a third proposed giving more powers to a new northern government.
The showcase resolution from the national MP caucus, introduced by Windsor MP Susan Whelan, was a general “kitchen sink” kind of proposal promoting rural job creation and affirming the government commitment that the rural impact of all policies will be assessed before they are implemented.
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The next morning, that general resolution was approved by the full convention as Liberal Party policy.
It promised everything, and nothing.
Yet rural Liberals at the convention were fairly brimming with enthusiasm over the recognition of rural Canada given by the governing party.
One MP enthused: “We’ve sent out a strong message to rural Canadians that we will be there for them.”
Far be it for an outsider to contradict that promise. There is obvious symbolic, and perhaps practical, value in having Canada’s urban political party recognize the need to keep rural concerns in mind.
Perhaps the MP had it right and the Liberal government will provide such strong rural policies in the next three years that rural Canada will prosper.
But it is difficult to see how the scant attention paid to rural issues at last week’s convention furthers that prospect.
In fact, the first reference to rural issues could be read as a negative.
In his keynote address to the party Friday night, prime minister Jean ChrŽtien was enthusing about the “golden age” Canada is entering, the age of a computer in every school.
The future economy will be based on “knowledge and technology,” he said, “not resources.” Whoops. Does that mean the leader of the country, who has bragged that he is part of rural caucus because of his urban/rural Quebec riding, subscribes to the finance department view that agriculture is yesterday’s industry?
Absolutely not, said southern Ontario MP Bob Speller, chair of the Liberal rural caucus. Agriculture is as much based on knowledge and technological innovation sector as any. “That was not a putdown of the resource sectors.”
But presumably if ChrŽtien meant to laud resource industries such as agriculture as part of the new economy, his speechwriters could have inserted a qualifier to say just that. They did not. They left it implying that the future economy depends on what we know and build, rather than what we grow and harvest.
Agriculture lobbyists often complain that they have a difficult time convincing non-agricultural government bureaucrats in Ottawa that farming has become home to some leading-edge research, science and technology – a sunrise industry.
No wonder.
