This is why rural Ontario is fading away

We can’t dismiss it as a political divide between Liberals and PCs

The urban-rural divide is swiftly becoming one of the most pressing issues of economic policy in this century. From Europe to England to the United States and yes, here in Canada, the sweeping changes to physical landscapes have translated to sweeping changes in political landscapes.

As David Reevely pointed out last week, Ontario’s urban centres have seen economic growth and recovery that the stretches of rural land separating those centres simply haven’t. There are multiple reasons for this, one being that Ontario’s municipalities have been practising a policy of intensification for years. That policy encourages people to live in cities where there is work, in part to preserve existing farmland and protected lands outside urban centres. Intensification is an answer to ugly and wasteful suburban sprawl, and a response to the flight of young people out of the suburban and rural areas and into cities.

This policy comes at a time when rural life is growing less and less attractive. Certainly the cost of land and living is low, which should be enough to keep some young people in the area. But most of the jobs that guarantee a living wage can no longer be obtained without a university degree, and even workers with graduate degrees are forced to reckon with the corporate preference for no-stringsattached contract workers, and the vagaries of the “gig economy.” We cannot tell our young people that in order to succeed they must be educated, then complain when they leave home for that education.

On the other hand, characterizing this divide as the fight between “Liberalville and Toryland” sounds catchy but doesn’t tell the whole story. Cities don’t win the presence of major employers because they’re socially or democratically liberal. They win major employers because they’re better places to live, and better places to live tend to be socially progressive.

This August, Toronto was ranked the fourth most livable city in the world. (This, despite its decrepit subway system and its history of carding and other odious practices.) Are the executives at major firms really going to tell some of their most valuable employees that they’re moving locations to a less expensive area where they might be the only visible minority in a crowd? Or where they might not find a Pride event? This has nothing to do with who is in power, and everything to do with long-standing local culture.

That said, the urban-rural divide in Ontario is just as important and as dangerous as the urban-rural divide that doomed England to Brexit, and created the opening for Donald Trump in the U.S. More resources must be allocated to including people from all walks of life in Canadian prosperity.

That includes refugees from Syria, and it also includes the people in the rural reaches whose jobs have been automated away. It’s terrible that Ontario said no to green energy this year. Those jobs could have made significant changes to the way of life in rural Ontario; building and maintaining windmills and solar panels would save jobs and the environment.