Last week Jay Kuo's excellent newsletter, The Status Kuo, published an article called "Blue Cities Under Red State Rule" with the subhead "Red-state legislatures exerting anti-democratic control over blue cities is the latest Republican power grab." In it he looks at how three US cities, Houston, Nashville, and Jackson, all Democratically controlled, are coping with right-wing Republican state legislatures.
It’s becoming a disturbing trend. Within many red states, there are often blue urban areas that wish to enact progressive policies and ensure things like access to the voting booth. Yet they find themselves increasingly stymied by state officials. In some cases, the state governments have completely preempted local ordinances, and in the most extreme cases have replaced local officials with state level ones, removing local control entirely.
Unfortunately, the political polarization outlined in Kuo's article is also a factor in Canadian politics. It's particularly evident in Ontario, which currently has a right-of-centre Conservative majority government that has rode roughshod over the less conservative government of the City of Toronto. In the most notorious case, the provincial government slashed the size of Toronto's city council from 47 to 25 seats, to "promote more efficient government".
Recently, the provincial government tried to remove land from the Greenbelt surrounding the Greater Toronto Area, in a bid to promote more housing development. This proved so unpopular that it was forced to reverse its decision and there are now investigations into potential corruption.
Currently the provincial government seems hell-bent on redeveloping Ontario Place on the waterfront, again against the wishes of the City of Toronto, and causing concerns about the cozy relationship between the Province and big developers.
At the provincial level, most City of Toronto ridings went to the NDP or Liberal parties. Suburban and rural areas surrounding Toronto are largely Conservative.
As the CBC points out, this disparity also exists at the Federal level.
According to Elections Canada, the metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — the country's three biggest cities — account for 116 of Canada's 338 ridings. And the results in those ridings help to tell the story of both the Liberal victory and a fundamental split in federal politics.
Of those 116 ridings, the Liberals won 86 — more than half of their national total. The Conservatives won just eight.
That Liberal strength in cities is part of an urban-rural split that now defines the electoral map in Canada. New research suggests the urban-rural divide between the Liberal and Conservative parties has never been wider.
This article from the National Observer examines the consequences of this disparity in more detail.
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.
Given that current polling suggests that the Conservatives are likely to form the next federal government, this does not bode well for Canada's longer term prospects in combatting climate change or in resolving the many issues confronting Canadian cities.
