As I listen to talking heads on national media discuss the divide between urban and rural Canadians, I often don’t recognize my neighbours in the supposedly “rural personality”.
    Oh I know rural people often have a different take on life than urban-dwellers. Farmers’ lives are different than your typical town and city resident’s. They deal with the uncertainty of nature when drought or untimely rains can change a family’s future prospects. It’s a reality that seldom affects urbanites. 
    Nor are people in town at the mercy of fluctuating prices that make annual income uncertain. Usually they can count on a stable income unless a recession or pandemic means they get laid off at work.
    Most urbanites are employees who often see the boss as a problem. Farmers are self-employed, often employers themselves, dealing with finding and keeping good workers.
    Naturally these differences can lead people to want different things from their political leaders. Political commentators often see rural voters as rock-ribbed conservatives, and they are, right now, with Conservatives representing most of Ontario’s federal rural ridings and Progressive Conservatives, provincially.
    I thought it was that way myself when I was growing up with Progressive Conservatives winning every time there was a federal or provincial election. The PCs won every federal election in my riding for 40 years.
    But voters were more flexible than I supposedly, as I discovered when I went to work as a summer student for A.Y. Mclean at the Huron Expositor in Seaforth in the summer of 1967. There on his office wall was a photo of my boss at the United Nations with the future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. It turned out Andy had been the Liberal MP for Huron-Perth from 1949 to 1953.
    By then, too, Murray Gaunt, the popular farm director at CKNX Radio and Television, had been elected as a Liberal to represent Huron-Bruce in the Ontario Legislature. He and his successor, Murray Elston, teamed with Eddie Sargent in Grey-Bruce, Jack Riddell in Huron-Middlesex and Hugh Edigoffer in Perth, to paint the region that serves as the main circulation area of The Rural Voice Liberal red for two decades. They even got their turn in government when David Peterson was Premier.
    But people turned against Peterson after he called a snap election. Just to show they couldn’t be typecast, the voters of the same area elected NDP members instead of returning to the PCs. They returned to form, electing PCs under the Mike Harris Progressive Conservative government, then turfed many of those members out, electing Liberals again under Dalton McGuinty.
    So obviously, though they may tend toward voting Conservative, the rural areas of western Ontario have tried all three major parties, provincially, in the past few decades. Federally, too, members like Paul Steckle won for the Liberals.
    As well, despite our reputation as individualists, rural areas of Ontario have a tradition of collectivism that would get them branded socialists by today’s U.S. Republicans. From early pioneer days people learned there were some problems they had to gang up on. They got together for barn raisings and threshing bees.
    Likewise, they started mutual insurance companies, co-op stores and credit unions. In the days before medicare was adopted in the 1960s, they even started co-operative health insurance companies.
    The co-operative tradition has faded in recent decades as large equipment makes farmers more independent, but it only takes a neighbour in trouble to see it demonstrated as people set aside their own work and flock to help.
    So please, urban commentators, don’t try to sell a simplistic definition of rural voters to me.◊