People living in rural and small communities in Ontario are facing serious issues: poverty, lack of economic opportunity, industrial decline due to globalism, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities for young people, lack of services for seniors, the need for improved accessibility to health care, lack of affordable housing, lack of rental housing, lack of public transit, the need for infrastructure renewal and alarming increased rates of opioid addiction to name a few.
So rural and small communities ought to be fertile ground for Ontario Liberals because these are exactly the kind of issues that Liberals care about.
Instead, rural and small town Ontario are neglected by the Ontario Liberal Party. Liberal premiers, cabinet ministers, MPPs and field workers rarely visit during elections or between elections. During election campaigns, ridings are prioritized by central campaign officials according to winability. So-called “unheld” ridings, particularly those in rural and small communities, are at the bottom of the priority list, meaning they receive little assistance. This neglect is reflected in the party’s election platform, which offer little if anything to move voters in rural and small communities.
Central party officials, based in Toronto, see ridings in rural and small communities as small 'c' conservative and the ground is ceded to our opponents in the Conservative party. This is a gift to the Conservatives and allows them to concentrate their resources elsewhere. As a result, little effort is made by the Liberal party to recruit strong candidates. Candidates are nominated late, hampering their ability to fund raise and build teams of volunteers and ensure they are properly trained. Local riding associations go into decline. I have heard anecdotally that more than 30 Liberal riding associations across the province have simply ceased to exist.
But are these ridings in rural and small communities truly Conservative? Actually, Conservative MPPs are often elected with something in the neighbourhood of 40 per cent of the vote, which of course means that something in the order of 60 per cent of the electors vote for progressive parties. Thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral system, these ridings are electing Conservatives. Need it necessarily be so?
In the largely rural and small town riding I live in, we had a Liberal member from 1975 to 1990 and an NDP member from 1990 to 1995. That doesn't sound like a Conservative riding to me. Since then we have had a Conservative MPP, but not because the riding is naturally Conservative. Arguably, it is because the central party neglects this and similar ridings by not doing the necessary nuts and bolts political work to support on-the-ground local Liberal activists during and between elections.
I always say that some of our strongest Liberal volunteers are in these so-called unheld ridings in rural and small town Ontario, because they continue to hang on and fight the good fight for the party, with little to no support, in election after election after election. But time makes inroads on us all, and our volunteers, as wonderful as they are, are aging or even dying and not being replaced by the next generation.
The path to a renewed Ontario Liberal Party under a new leader must, at least in part, be along the rural concession roads and small town streets of our province.