Facing the new two solitudes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2024 (673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s becoming a theme — not necessarily a new one, but one that in the last 12 months has been stark.

In last year’s Manitoba election, the breakdown was pretty clear: Winnipeg electoral districts voted NDP, while rural districts went Progressive Conservative.

Alberta? Edmonton and a chunk of Calgary elected NDP MLAs, while most other ridings, and almost all rural ridings, went to the United Conservative Party.

British Columbia? An NDP majority government win this past weekend, once again heavily weighted to urban seats in the Vancouver and Victoria area.

And now, Saskatchewan: the diminished Saskatchewan Party majority government after this week’s election will be almost entirely represented by rural MLAs, while almost every urban constituency in Saskatoon and Regina went to the NDP.

It’s almost like urban and rural districts across Western Canada are speaking different languages — or, perhaps more to the point, facing different kinds of problems, and seeking different kinds of supports.

In Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel The Two Solitudes, the rift in this country was seen as the lack of communication — the sheer inability to communicate on the same level — between English Canada and French Canada.

And that, to an extent, is still here: Quebec is a distinct province, one that holds an oversized amount of sway in federal politics and in the minds of federal politicians.

But the new Canadian solitudes — urban and rural — aren’t going to last, at least, not in any kind of equal balance.

So we’d better learn how to talk. Because all of Canada’s regions — and all Canadians — need to be fairly represented by their governments.

Canada’s increases in population are by and large urban, and that means, though the process of electoral reform is always slow, that eventually — because each person’s vote has to have close to the same amount of weight as anyone else’s — there will be more and more urban districts, even if the number of rural ridings stay the same.

The other option? As the ratio of population in rural versus urban areas continues to slip, for fairness’s sake alone, the number of rural ridings will have to shrink.

In many provinces, there’s already been a bit of a nod-and-a-wink to maintain urban-rural balance: independent electoral boundaries commissions in several provinces often provide a range of how many voters there should be in each riding, with rural ridings often nearing the minimum number of potential voters within their boundaries, while urban ridings edge closer to the maximum number. Already, then, there is a tacit unfairness that protects some of Canada’s rural areas by giving them political clout that’s out of proportion to their actual populations.

In still other jurisdictions, a subtler form of near-gerrymandering occurs, where a small portion of an urban area is hived off and attached to a rural district, so that the number of rural voters is still larger than their urban counterparts in the riding — meaning any push to address urban issues is unlikely to have the same effect it would in a fully urban riding.

But neither of those methods will work forever.

Canada is just not likely to stay the way it was.

A big, relatively sparsely populated area — especially one with a shrinking population — can’t expect to endlessly hold electoral sway over more densely populated urban areas. Or even maintain equality in the number of ridings.

The split right now between the two new solitudes might be pretty stark — but the truth is that, provincially and federally, more and more votes, and more and more ridings, will be urban, facing issues like homelessness, crime and poverty.

Let’s try to meaningfully address the divide before it becomes even more stark.