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COMMENTARY
October 8, 2011
City & country news
The Progressive Conservatives won Thursday's provincial election by a landslide. That is, if you take Toronto and Ottawa out of the results. Too, if you have an aversion to the colour orange, you might want to eliminate northern Ontario.Add these back in and we have a Liberal minority, only one seat short of home and dry. Which means, I expect, four years of the NDP tail waving the Liberal dog. I was up late Thursday almost praying that one close race would switch Conservative to Liberal, in order to avoid this fate. I'm a city boy myself, as I have declared on several occasions. This condition is not easy to overcome. One becomes habituated to having a million unknown neighbours. I actually love cities, in a Jane Jacobs kind of way, and love to explore what has three dimensions. In the country, a city boy finds only two. That said, I have also long admitted that people who live in cities - or more precisely, modern conurbations spread so wide that one cannot possibly exit them on foot - tend, over time, to become insane. Happily, most get no farther than "partial insanity," but without encumbering gentle reader with anecdotes, let me say that this partiality applies with a vengeance to political judgements. In the city, among great numbers, and where government is conducted in a massive, centralized way - where tax monies evaporate then shower like the rain - the perception of cause and effect fogs over. People become abstracted from things, and can be swayed by words alone. "Progressive" politics, an essentially urban phenomenon, depends on magical illusions. And as I have learned through my eyes and ears, city folk readily buy into propositions which country folk would immediately identify as lunatic. Chief among these, I think, is the superstitious belief, that there is an immense repository of unearned wealth, that exists in and of itself, like the interior of our planet. It can be used to fund anything we want. And the politician who refuses to tap in, is a "Blue Meanie." Allied with this is a curious notion about human freedom. It consists once again of magical powers. They are called "rights," and they are conferred by enlightened gnostic forces. An infinite number of rights is available, but once again, the Blue Meanies demur, leaving us in the confined condition of apartment dwellers. But every once in a while, a charismatic politician comes along, who can intercede with these enlightened gnostic forces, and give us the ability to fly. Out there in Hickville, however, the terms of reference are changed. People are born, pass through childhood, then come of age. They get married, and have children of their own. Then they get old, and die. Meanwhile they live in things called families; and take pleasure in small things, entirely within their means. Most of them believe in God, and in a fixed moral order. This precludes belief in urban cargo cults, or enlightened gnostic forces. Their hypocrisies are of the conventional kind: they will take what they can get from government, but understand it is related to taxes. Freedom, for them, means freedom from tyranny. Even their idea of the communal is different in kind from the urban idea: for it consists of voluntary associations. While political commentators, overwhelmingly urban and sophisticated, discuss voting trends this way and that, the background of provincial politics remains remarkably constant. The only background trend has been the demographic one, towards urbanization. I think of candidates like Jack MacLaren, who sailed home in Carleton-Mississippi Mills by a margin of more than 9,000 votes. He had previously defeated the venerable, prominent, and much more "Progressive" Conservative Norm Sterling, for the party nomination, to the amazement of urban commentators, who predicted the Tory vote would then be seriously split. There is no editorial board in this country that would have the time of day for Jack MacLaren, a former president of the Ontario Landowners Association, reflexively called a "Tea Party Tory," "far right," "extremist," and so forth. His deep rural roots in the riding, and his pride in that "culture and heritage," are themselves given as a reason to consider him scary-dark. And true enough, if you ran him in Ottawa Centre, he might have trouble taking third place from the Green Party. But there he is, in anno 2011, posted to the Ontario Legislature; in the city which, when it began to panic about taxes and costs, elected Rob Ford mayor. There are two Ontarios, as I say: the "backward," rural, "heritage" one, and the progressive urban multicultural one; the hay wain and the space ship. My reading of the election result is that, in defiance of the media's laws of the universe, the old Ontario began to encroach on the new. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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