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Canada’s urban-rural divide is now a chasm
It’s been a busy week here in Alberta, with fallout from the provincial election and ongoing skirmishes over climate policy and the conservative movement’s refusal to take much of anything about it seriously.
Let’s dive right in.
Canada’s urban-rural divide is now a chasm
From Quebec’s long-simmering separatist ambitions to the new ones in Alberta and Saskatchewan threatening to come to a boil, national unity has long been a concern for Canadian politicians. But there’s a new threat to the fabric of the nation bubbling up from underneath the surface: the urban-rural divide.
Alberta’s recent provincial election was just the latest example of how distant urban and rural Canadians have grown from each other. The NDP won all but two of its 38 seats in greater Edmonton or Calgary (the other two: Lethbridge-West and Banff-Kananaskis), while Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party won 37 out of 41 seats outside those two cities. As a result, she has no elected representation in the provincial capital and a significantly diminished number of mostly suburban Calgary ridings from which to draw her new cabinet.
In a province more urbanized than most, this is going to make things harder than they probably should be for a newly elected government. Ironically, Smith’s predicament is a mirror image of the one Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has dealt with over the last few years, as his caucus has been composed almost entirely of urban MPs. The days of Liberals being competitive in rural Canada (never mind actually winning) seem to be over, at least for the time being, while Conservatives are at risk of becoming an even more endangered species in the most urbanized parts of Canada’s big cities.
As the University of Calgary’s Jack Lucas and Western’s Zack Taylor noted after the last federal election: “The urban-rural gap between the two parties was greater in the 2019 and 2021 elections than at any point in Canada’s history.” This means both parties are effectively incapable of forming a truly representative national caucus, and that has a bunch of negative knock-on effects. “As parties become durably uncompetitive on each others’ turf, they lose touch with the concerns of significant portions of the population,” Lucas and Taylor write. “The portion of each party’s caucus that comes from safe seats increases. [And] as the parties increasingly represent different social and economic worlds and speak different policy languages, conflicts will only become more entrenched.”
This entrenchment of conflict in our politics is glaringly obvious right now, and nowhere more so than on the issue of climate change. The Liberals, who represent the parts of the country where the economy doesn’t depend on resource extraction or agricultural activity, have implemented a suite of policies that clearly favour people living in urban Canada. Conservatives, on the other hand, seem almost proud of their refusal to take the issue of climate change seriously, a stance that mirrors the view held by many rural Canadians. In that sort of polarized environment, a true and lasting consensus on almost anything, never mind something as contentious as climate policy, seems virtually impossible.
It doesn’t need to be this way. The many millions of people who live in our urban environments, and who create much of its economic and creative vitality, should remember that rural Canada delivers the food, energy and other supplies we routinely take for granted. And rural Canadians should realize our cities are important magnets for attracting talent, capital and investment — all things that help keep their businesses in business and their livelihoods alive. We need each other far more than we realize, and far more than our political culture wants to reflect.
The only way to narrow this divide, and prevent further polarization between rural and urban Canada, is to repair that culture. Democratic reform could easily address some of these cleavages, most notably by replacing our outdated electoral system with one that doesn’t actively reward regional divisions and a winner-take-all mindset. In a perfect world, we’d consider something like rural-urban proportional representation, a complex hybrid of the best elements of mixed-member proportional and single transferable vote systems that seems perfectly suited to Canada’s geography.
In a less perfect world — in other words, this one — we would at least consider some kind of electoral reform that makes it theoretically possible for Liberals to get elected in rural Alberta and Saskatchewan and Conservatives elected in downtown Toronto and Vancouver. We could pair that with a return to the per-vote subsidy model of political funding, one that encouraged parties to take a broader view of the electorate — and was eliminated when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister. It’s not a coincidence that polarization was risen dramatically ever since, alongside with the rage-farming and micro-targeting that now drives much of the tactical thinking in our political class and their relentless drive for donations.
We could even invest in new programs and institutions that try to break up the two solitudes of urban and rural Canada, and encourage people from one to experience the other. Maybe that’s a national exchange program that sends city kids to the farm and rural kids to the big city, one with all the necessary and attendant safeguards. Maybe that’s something else. But one way or another, we have to find a way to start talking to each other again — and actually listening.
If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves living in a country where any functional sense of national unity is a thing of the past. That will impair our ability to meet challenges, capture opportunities and ensure that our politics aren’t being driven by the loudest and meanest in our midst. In some respects, that’s been happening for a while now. That’s why the time to act is now, before it’s too late. That is, if it isn’t already.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
As a columnist, you have to keep track of your wins and losses. And generally speaking, I think my record is better than most people who do this for a living. My skeptical take on the Han Dong story, and Global’s curiously aggressive coverage of it, seems to have been validated by both David Johnston’s initial report and the news that Sam Cooper, the reporter who wrote it, is no longer with Global.
But if I’m being fair, I have to post my losses as well as my wins. And my column from late 2021 on the Calgary arena deal (one that suggested the team’s “billionaire owners just played themselves”) definitely meets that standard. “If the Flames ownership group still thinks paying for the climate mitigation measures on their new arena is an expense they can’t afford,” I wrote, “they’re about to find out what that really costs.” In reality, it’s Calgary taxpayers who got played here — and played masterfully by those aforementioned billionaires.
I should have known better — and better than most, at that. After all, back in 2016 I wrote a feature-length profile of Flames owner Murray Edwards for Report on Business, one that described him as the “artist of the deal.” He has rarely, if ever, come out on the wrong end of a business deal or negotiation, and it has become abundantly clear that Calgary city council was not a worthy opponent here.
They have, after all, apparently signed off on a preliminary deal that will see Calgarians put up $853.3 million to just $40 million from the Flames owners. The NHL team will control naming rights and all operating revenues associated with the facility, and because it’s technically owned by the city, they won’t have to pay property taxes either.
In the end, they’ll hand back an aging and likely worthless building to the city in 35 years, just in time for another set of owners to run the same pro sports extortion scheme that’s become so familiar by now.
The artist of the deal clearly painted himself another masterpiece here — one that city council was apparently happy to buy. That they rushed it out ahead of the election, and gave the UCP’s Danielle Smith an important card to play in Calgary, makes it even better for Edwards. After all, their re-election means Canadian Natural Resources (his biggest and most important holding) doesn’t have to pay three additional percentage points in corporate taxes, which could save it — and him — billions of dollars over the next four years alone.
Where there’s smoke, there’s denial
Over the last few years, people living in Western Canada have become accustomed to the mixed blessing that is summer. That’s because the heat and lack of moisture is helping create a fifth season on the calendar: smoke. Now, it seems, Eastern Canada is getting a taste of this unpleasant new medicine.
From Ottawa down to Toronto and throughout the Eastern Seaboard in the United States, smoke from Canadian wildfires is choking the air and creating all sorts of additional risks for people with respiratory conditions and other vulnerabilities. And it has some people wondering if this reminder of what climate change actually looks like will change minds on the issue and its importance.
I’m not so sure about that. As the smoke lifts, so will the sense of urgency it’s creating. The most strident opposition to climate policy isn’t coming from the Greater Toronto Area or Ottawa or New York City, either. It’s coming from Alberta and Saskatchewan and other non-coastal regions, and they’ve already had to deal with this sort of smoke for years now — with no apparent impact on attitudes or voting behaviour. The usual suspects, meanwhile, will explain these wildfires away as the consequence of something — anything — other than climate change.
What might really move the needle are some of the second-order effects here. In California, for example, State Farm will no longer offer home insurance — not just in wildfire zones, but everywhere in the state. “Risk has a price,” said Roy Wright, the former official in charge of insurance at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and now head of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group. “We’re just now seeing it.”
Florida, another state that tends to bear the brunt of climate change impacts, is in a similar situation. The list of places and areas where climate change exerts a meaningful economic influence is only going to keep growing. As the CBC’s Aaron Wherry wrote, “Like the smoky air enveloping Parliament Hill, climate change eventually will permeate every political issue, from health care to national security. In many ways, it already is. But climate change is too often framed as a secondary issue.”
This particular set of wildfires won’t change that overnight, and it won’t convince those who are determined to remain ignorant here. But in time, and hopefully not much more of it, that ignorance will come at such a high price that even they won’t want to pay it.
The Wrap
On Tuesday, I debunked an argument against climate action that I’m hearing more and more these days: but China. It’s the latest attempt to slow-walk climate policy by conservative politicians, pundits and the interests they represent, and it deliberately misrepresents what’s actually happening in China. We’d do well to pay attention if we don’t want to end up getting lapped in the race to net zero.
And on Monday, we dropped the penultimate episode of the first season of the Maxed Out podcast. My guest was former mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who’s in the midst of a fascinating personal and political evolution — one that deserves both our attention and respect. It certainly has mine, anyways.
Oh, and speaking of breaking out of our silos: I joined the Western Standard’s Derek Fildebrandt, who appeared on an earlier episode of my podcast, in his studio to discuss the Alberta election results and the future of Canadian media. Turnabout is fair play, after all.
Next week, this newsletter will be on a brief hiatus, as I take a few days to attend to some personal matters (in other words, moving and unpacking). But I’ll be back at it in two weeks time and, as always, you can find me on Twitter at @maxfawcett or by email at [email protected]