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 other's 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 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.

This column is featured in my weekly newsletter, which you can get delivered to your inbox. If you want to stay up to date on my signature, no-nonsense opinion writing, subscribe here.