The urban/rural divide over resource extraction

Our next Housing Happy Hour is tonight, Tuesday June 16, from 7 to 9 pm, at the Pleasant (2434 Main Street). If you’re interested, even if you’re not sure you can make it, please email russilwvong@gmail.com.

We’re planning our next Day of Action on Sunday June 28:

When: Sunday June 28, 11 am to 2 pm
Where: Meet at Kingcrest Park, 4150 Knight Street
Registration link

Event description:

Join us as we celebrate Canada Day a little early by connecting with neighbours across Vancouver Kingsway.

We will be walking around the neighbourhood, knocking on doors, and listening to what’s on people’s minds.

We will meet at Kingcrest Park before heading out together. After door knocking, we will gather for a casual social with soft drinks and snacks.

What’s driving feelings of resentment in Alberta?

I think of it as a urban/rural divide over resource extraction. As a national party, it’s important for Liberals to keep this in mind.

Matthew Yglesias describes the general phenomenon:

Rural communities tend to have natural resource extraction of various kinds — fishing, logging, mining, ranching, farming — at the core of their economic model. In a rural community, like any other community, most people work in local service industries. But the natural resource extraction is the export, it’s the thing that brings money into the community, it’s the reason the community exists. So when you adopt a regulatory posture that is hostile to the interests of natural resource extraction, people don’t want to vote for you.

Vaughn Palmer, writing in 2013 about the recent BC election: Dix’s Kinder Morgan surprise turned blue-collar vote in heartland against NDP.

Just to the south of the Cariboo, in the riding of Fraser-Nicola, longtime NDP MLA and former cabinet minister Harry Lali had a relatively easy time of it in 2009, beating the Liberals by seven points in percentage terms and almost 900 ballots in the vote count.

This time out the Liberals, with a stronger candidate — longtime school trustee and lately member of Ashcroft council Jackie Tegart — managed a modest increase to 6,002 votes from last outing’s 5,830.

Not enough to beat Lali if the NDP had been able to hold its vote. It didn’t. Instead the party shed 1,315 votes from the 2009 total and Lali was beaten for the first time in five runs for a seat in the legislature.

“The real kicker was Kinder Morgan,” Lali told The Vancouver Sun’s Jonathan Fowlie in a recent interview in the provincial capital where he’d come to clean out his desk. “When the announcement about the Kinder Morgan pipeline was made, it basically decimated Interior and northern B.C. for us — rural B.C., basically.”

“You can’t be against (Enbridge’s) Northern Gateway, you can’t be against Site C, you can’t be against Kinder Morgan and all of that because the message from the blue-collar worker is: ‘Those are my jobs. I’m in construction, I need that job.’ The blue-collar worker virtually abandoned the NDP in this election, mostly by staying at home.”