The recent provincial election West of Manitoba’s border confirmed an urban-rural divide.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats and the NDP 27. Remarkably, the Sask Party took zero seats in Regina and only one in Saskatoon. Their win was solely based on rural votes and smaller cities, save for the two most northern ridings, which voted NDP.
It was a similar story in Manitoba’s election last year. The NDP took all but three seats in Winnipeg, yet only beat the PCs in the provincial popular vote by four percent.
In 1945, Hugh McLennan wrote the novel The Two Solitudes about a fictional character, Paul Tallard, struggling to reconcile his identity’s French and English sides. Cultural and language barriers kept the two communities from communicating, leaving them mutually isolated.
Eighty years later, Canadians have an urban-rural divide that may run just as deep.
The rural economy and outlook remain grounded. Agriculture, forestry, oil, and mining drive the economy, while the tight-knit social and multi-generational ties leave a greater sense of identity and belonging. Deep bonds linger, first forged in the early years of settlement as people relied on each other to survive. Their outlook remains practical, as any successful private sector endeavours must be.
Urban life looks different. People pass others they don’t know and may never see again as they drive on streets, walk on sidewalks, take buses, and shop. The cosmopolitan nature of city life offers diversity but compromises social connectedness.
The physical environment of cities is inherently artificial, including designed parks and green spaces. This environment matches the mindset and economy, much of which is often more conceptual than real. Academics earn a living from ideas, bankers and stockbrokers vie for digital wealth, and the government apparatus rakes in tax dollars. The service industry and government administrators may do things but generally don’t make things. The public sector rules but its unions are rarely satisfied.
Urban children think food just comes from a store. They grow up to become climate change activists with little appreciation of how net zero carbon schemes will compromise their quality of life. Detached from the cycles and rhythms of nature, harmful schemes and ideologies increasingly lack balance and common sense.
Cities will continue to be most people’s homes in Canada and centres of high productivity and wealth concentration. They will always be the home of the universities, the parliaments, the city halls with the most massive budgets, the media outlets, the most ardent activists, and the biggest centres of commerce and banking. That which is outside the city becomes an outlier for city-dwellers–out of sight, out of mind, and thought to be out-of-touch and out-of-sync.
In one city, I saw a bumper sticker that called for an end to pipelines. Its owner had no regard for what fuels his car, nor the greater pollution and risks by alternate transportation such as trucks, trains, and tankers. Such practical realities were lost on that activist urbanite.
While the urban-rural gap will always remain, the city will always need the country because urban life and industry are founded on the resources the country produces. This is especially true in post-industrial countries with resource-driven economies like Canada’s. Now, more than ever, the city also needs the practical, personal, and family values of the country. The challenge is in reducing the gap and making that happen.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
