FOR A highly successful Liberal who has won six elections and is almost always thick-skinned and optimistic, Wayne Easter sounded downright discouraged.
On Oct. 14, he triumphed for the sixth straight time in Malpeque riding on Prince Edward Island but it was a close and nasty race that left him declaring it the toughest since he got into federal politics in 1993, never mind his years in National Farmers Union politics.
He returns to Ottawa in mid-November to face a strengthened Conservative minority regime and a governing party he clearly despises in both ideology and personality.
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And he returns to a Liberal caucus much diminished and lacking almost any rural representation beyond a handful of Atlantic MPs. He will have to try to sell the idea of putting the party on the line for rural issues like defence of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly even though most of his fellow MPs will look at him blankly.
The Conservatives have a stronger mandate to do what he thinks is wrong for rural Canada.
“I am feeling a bit lonely in my world but I will take it on,” he said days after the election.
It would discourage a saint and a saint he ain’t.
Then comes a darker side.
“I don’t know if I’ll be the agriculture critic in the new Parliament,” he says. “I’m not even sure I want to be. The same debates all the time and there are other issues that interest me out there.”
The kicker is the lack of reward for what he has been doing. Although Easter has championed the CWB and other issues that affect farmers across the country, the party gets no farmer payback. Election after election, they vote overwhelmingly for Conservatives.
In the recently completed campaign, he was criticized in his own riding for speaking in Parliament more often about the CWB than about local agricultural issues.
“And in terms of politics, there certainly is no payback across the country, no political payback,” he said. “We defend farmers, I convince my caucus to support farmer rights and yet there is no vote payback for us.”
Indeed, the Liberal party has largely become the party of downtown large cities.
Its 76-seat caucus in the next Parliament is dominated by urban representatives.
Its understanding of rural issues is largely theoretical and the problem becomes a vicious circle. Few rural MPs in caucus means there is little rural sensibility injected into policy debates and the policies show it.
The NDP, shut out of rural agricultural seats again, has the same problem.
Resigning Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, the epitome of the urban academic who looks uncomfortable at a photo op in front of methane-producing cows, clearly was part of the problem.
But it is a much deeper disconnect between the Liberals and rural Canada, a disconnect that began decades ago on the Prairies but has spread across the country.
Through the 1990s, the Jean Chrétien Liberals at least held virtually all of Ontario’s 40 or so rural seats. They now have been lost to the resurgent Conservatives.
It is easy to see why Easter would feel isolated and lonely.
And it raises questions about his claim that Liberal policy began to connect to rural Canada in 2008 if only the Conservatives had not distorted the impact of the Green Shift carbon tax policy that Easter privately thought was a rural disaster. Really?
