HAVEN’T WE heard this before? Last weekend, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff continued his quest for credibility in rural Canada by telling Canadian municipal leaders at their annual meeting that a future Liberal government would consider every policy “through the lens of rural Canada.”
Ah yes, the rural lens.
When he was junior minister for rural affairs, rural Ontario MP Andy Mitchell regularly invoked the image of the “rural lens” to suggest that the Liberal government understood the party had fallen out of favour in much of rural Canada and needed to reconnect.
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At its heart, the concept of a rural lens implies that when some bright light from the bureaucracy or cabinet proposes a policy – say registering long guns in reaction to a college shooting spree in downtown Montreal or an innocent’s death from a gang gun fight in downtown Toronto – cabinet will immediately turn to its rural “champion” to ask: “So how would this play in rural ridings, Andy? Any implications?”
And Rural Champion would say: “Well, many rural residents would see this as another big city attack on their rights and I expect it would end any chance of winning most rural seats for a generation or so. Were the guns in the Yonge Street shoot-out rifles?”
And urban representatives around the table would say: “Jeez, I never thought of that. I guess we should figure out how to deal with urban gun violence without driving rural folks into a frenzy of disenfranchisement feelings” or some such urban policy wonk talk.
Of course, the rural lens did not work that way in the majority Liberal government of the 1990s.
By holding Atlantic Canada, a sprinkling of Quebec seats and virtually all Ontario rural seats, the Chrétien government had one of the largest rural caucuses in modern Liberal history.
Prime minister Jean Chrétien even boasted that he was a member of rural caucus because of his urban/rural Quebec riding.
Yet the results were not demonstrably different. The Liberals still were viewed as a downtown party and policies were pursued that helped reduce the party to that image.
The reality is that the other 30 members around the cabinet table understand that while there may be some validity to the argument that rural Canada still produces the resource wealth of the nation, urban Canada represents more than 80 percent of the electorate and a smart fisherman drops his line in the pool where the fish are.
Ignatieff, God bless him, is trying to change the recent history of the party and if he succeeds, it would be an exceedingly good thing for Canadian democracy.
A country where the Liberals were competitive in rural Canada and the Conservatives were competitive in the three largest cities would be a healthier democracy.
But a rural champion (as the Federation of Canadian Municipalities suggests) or a rural lens (as Ignatieff promises to reinvent) won’t change the political dynamic that rural Canada is increasingly a political minority.
To make urban Liberal MPs understand that rural isn’t just the source of the big sucking sound that takes tax dollars out of cities will require a change in ideology, bias and experience.
Even dedicated anti-Liberals should wish Ignatieff well.
