IT WAS late days in a campaign she already knew she was losing and deputy-prime minister Anne McLellan was in a reflective mood at the end of an interview, talking about the fractious country she had helped govern for more than 12 years.
The Edmonton lawyer with roots on a Nova Scotia dairy farm agreed Canada is an increasingly politically divided country but not in the way many observers see it.
“I think the major cleavages we are developing in our country are not east-west or Ontario-Alberta,” she said. “They are actually going to be urban-rural where increasingly, voters in the major cities have very different perspectives from those in the countryside around them.”
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To an extent, of course, it already has happened. The Jan. 23 election confirmed that the Conservative party is the overwhelming choice of rural voters while the Liberal base outside of Atlantic Canada is centred in the downtowns of Canada’s three largest cities.
It is one of the many dilemmas facing the Stephen Harper government. How can it develop policies and programs that reflect the interests of long-loyal rural Conservative supporters while reaching out to urban voters who relegated him to a weak minority in Parliament?
There are, of course, issues that cross the rural-urban divide. All voters want access to reliable health care, honest government, safe communities, streets and back roads and a robust economy.
But there are clearly issues that divide – a different view of the role gun control can play in crime prevention, for example, and often more conservative views on social or moral issues.
But the real divide that can be read into McLellan’s musings is in perception about what kind of a country Canada is and what policies can help it progress.
The largest cities – multicultural, expanding and booming – have a smug self-image as the economic engines of the country, the centres of learning and innovation, the magnets that attract investment and brainy educated immigrants from abroad and from rural Canada.
Often, this self-image is accompanied by a look-down-your-nose attitude toward “the hinterland,” where people are older, less educated, more white, less mobile and where kids with ambition and dreams leave.
Of course, missing from this attitude is the fact that rural Canada is home to many innovators, many dreams, much ambition and great resource wealth that supplies those bustling metropolises with the products they need to survive and thrive.
Still, it must be said that in Ontario, a farmer campaign to convince urbanites and politicians that “farmers feed cities” has not exactly made a dent in the condescension that flows out of Toronto, Ottawa and other large gathering places. The closest the major city media can come to recognizing the place of rural Canada is to nostalgically remember simpler days when Grandpa still owned the farm.
The political reality is that even though the Harper Conservatives have the most proportionately rural national government in almost 50 years, every decade when federal constituency boundaries are redrawn to reflect population shifts, the rural voice is diminished in the House of Commons.
If he wants to extend his prime ministership beyond Paul Martin’s low bar, Harper will have to recognize the urbanization of Canada and respond to it.
