this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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"underused 407". Well, how do you fix that when it's privately run and the most expensive rolled highway in the world. Lol
Which was sold to a foreign entity by the same government saying it's underused.
The conservative party is such a drain on prosperity for all... and now the leopards are eating the faces of the rurals that voted for them. And they won't learn.
Prior to 1995, the (southern) rural areas almost never voted Conservative, typically favouring the Liberals and sometimes the NDP (northern rural Ontario has maintained strong NDP support all along). To add, the NDP was born out of the former United Farmers party, so there was once a close association between them. The rural areas have been traditionally very left leaning.
The question is: What changed? It is unlikely that the people magically changed from one year to the next. Perhaps the Liberals and NDP figured rural areas were dying and thus not worth worrying about?
Well I don't know what happened really, but at a guess maybe it had something to do with all the farmers who sold out to either the big "agribusiness" operators that have largely replaced them or to housing developers. Concentration of ownership has been a problem in many industries, but rarely have the effects been so dramatic as in farming. Since the heyday of the United Farmers of Canada there are 75% fewer farms in Canada, and 233% more Canadians. Living in a "rural" area no longer means you're all that likely to own a farm,
While true, Ontario farms declined only by 1% from 1990 – when these rural areas by and large voted NDP – and 1995 – when they changed their ways. The declines were more like 10-15% every five years prior to that, as well as for a time after that, so this change happened during an anomalous period when there was effectively no decline in farms.
Essentially nobody in rural Northern Ontario owns a farm, but they have remained hardcore to the left. It is not that non-farming rural residents strictly hold different views either. What is interesting is that the same shift is observable at the exact same time in the rural southern prairies (like Ontario, the rural northern prairies also remained to the left), so it does seem that there is something, whatever it is, that targeted agricultural areas – although not necessarily farmers, as you point out – to bring on this change.