[LINK] On the Province of Rural Ontario

[rfmcdonald]

Andrew Steele's blog post at the Globe and Mail website makes a lot of sense.

The Bruce Peninsula MPP is not suggesting that Toronto accede to provincial status. It only sounds that way to those Annex-walking navel-gazers who think the Earth ends at Lawrence Avenue and believe Toronto City Hall requires provincial powers to get its house in order.

More importantly, that's not who Murdoch is talking to. He's talking to the rural base of the PC Party. And what he's saying, as clear as a bell, is that he wants rural Ontario to separate.

Assorted separatisms occasionally pop up in Ontario's discourse. Northerners from time to time resort to this kind of thinking, particularly the area west of the Lakehead.

But the idea of rural Ontario separatism feeds into a large and somewhat ignored political phenomenon gripping Ontario’s countryside.

Along the Highway 7 corridor that forms Ontario’s “blue belt,” just about the biggest political thing going right now is the Ontario Landowners Association. Here they are founding an association in Muskoka, exploiting anger over a tree cutting by-law. And here are the Landowners complaining about animal control officers in the Brampton Guardian.

In Lanark County, birthplace of the movement, the Landowners are planning to run a municipal slate of councilors for the 2010 election, according to the OLA website.

The Landowners came out to play at big municipal land-use hearings underway in Markham, stacking the meeting with 100 of their troops from all over mid-Eastern Ontario. The Peterborough County Landowners’ Association is calling for the dissolution of conservation authorities so people can be free to build on wetlands.

Closer to home, Carleton Landowners are currently active in Ottawa municipal politics, calling for separation for rural Carleton County from the City of Ottawa. And again in Muskoka, a lively dispute over snowmobile trails has broken out with the Landowners in centre stage. Back in Eastern Ontario, Goulbourn Landowners are upset about orchid regulations and are refusing to let provincial inspectors on their land.

This is a vast and growing movement, which has become a fact of rural politics in Ontario despite being mostly ignored by media outside of local weekly coverage. But ask Reeves or Wardens across rural county councils what their biggest challenge is for the 2010 election, and they don’t cite the economy or infrastructure or local roads. They point to this insurgency of populist outrage.

[. . .]

So make no mistake: [Conservative MLA Bill] Murdoch's call for rural separatism is pure OLA politics.

A smart populist like Murdoch never has his finger an inch away from the pulse of the people who live on the county line roads. He knows that rural separatism is a convenient banner for holding together the collection of resentments OLA advocates exploit without needing to take a position on each one. Instead, calling for expelling Toronto from Ontario is a convenient way to get heads nodding without having to actually take the hard positions on ending protection of drinking water or other Landowner policy asks.

Hudak's response -- see what you get, McGuinty, for not doing enough for these folks -- is a fairly predictable straddle. Pointing to one's own radical fellow-travellers in order to compel people of good will into an accommodating mode is not an illegitimate strategy.