As the Liberal Party selects its next leader and aims to restore its political standing in the short term, progressives more generally need to confront some longer-term questions including their declining resonance and representation in rural Canada.
In 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s majority was won in rural ridings, particularly in Ontario. His rural seat count then went down in 2019 and he lost them entirely in 2021. We see the same phenomenon in the United States and around parts of the Anglo-American world.
What happened? How did we get here when there was once a proud tradition of rural, agrarian progressivism? And can progressives make their case again in rural constituencies?
For the past four years, I’ve served as a municipal councillor in small-town Ontario. Here are some observations and lessons learned from the frontlines.
Although the differences between urban and rural Canadians can be overstated, my experience is that on key issues—including culture, climate change and service delivery—rural voters have tuned out progressive politicians. This corresponds with a report from the Public Policy Forum (PPF) that found that 72 percent of rural Canadians feel their government does not care about people like them.
On culture
In 2004, Barack Obama famously declared: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America: there’s the United States of America…We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”
Twenty years later, I still believe that sentiment is true, but people in rural communities have shifted further to the right, including on cultural issues.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has talked and written in the context of the U.S. election about the progressive “groups” pushing their politicians to sign on to “purity tests,” leading to the infamous ad President Kamala Harris supporting gender-reassignment surgeries for illegal immigrants in jail. It was a Mad Libs trying to set out an “edge case” that became a proxy for saying Harris was too out of the mainstream and did not “share our values.” The subsequent ad was less about the trans issues per se and more about spending priorities and relatability: “Trump is for us, Harris is for they/them.”
I have a personal theory on the way through this disconnect. I call it “live and let liberalism.” It’s basic libertarianism, which applies from issues as divergent as gun ownership to trans rights. The basic premise? The average rural person is quite content to live their own life and let you live theirs.
They’ll put up a pride flag but they’d like the Canadian flag to stay up on the school flagpole, too. They’ll help their Muslim neighbours with yard work during Ramadan. They might bemoan immigration being “out of control” but they’ll volunteer every Thursday at the food bank knowing its clientele includes a disproportionate number of immigrants.
Call me naïve, but I believe the vast, vast majority of Canadians are decent people who are neighbourly, polite and fair.
What the average person does not want is politicians preaching to them.
Let me give you an example of how I handled these cultural disputes.
I recall canvassing for re-election and a gentleman had my sign on his lawn already. We had a quick chat and he said, “I got one question, Scott: What do you think of the library hosting this drag storytime show?”
I think I probably gulped a bit, but I replied matter-of-factly: “I’m OK with it, but then again, I grew up with Mrs. Doubtfire.”

Courtland Klein asks a question during a town hall at University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan on Thursday January 10, 2019. Michael Bell/The Canadian Press.
His face flashed anger—this was not the answer he wanted to hear—but then he clued into the Robin Williams reference. Maybe he pictured the “dude looks like a lady” vacuum-cleaner dance. He smiled despite himself.
We chatted a bit more and shook hands, essentially agreeing to disagree.
I suppose I could have shut him down or moved on to the next door, writing the constituent off as a bigot. But he wasn’t one. He just had questions. Engaged in a fair-minded discussion without judgement, he relaxed about something that was clearly bothering him. I think the humour helped, too. I am by no means a perfect politician, and I’m sure people will tell me how I mishandled this interaction and betrayed the side, but it’s what felt right in the moment.
Of course, human rights are non-negotiable. But is advancing “inclusion” done by in turn excluding others, making them feel demeaned, or is it done by finding common ground and persuading?
Trudeau famously spoke about “sunny ways,”- an idiom derived from a fable that teaches gentle sunshine is an easier way to coax someone than forceful winds. The skies have grown darker for left-wing parties since then, but we must adapt.
On climate
Saving money and being frugal is a basic, small-town, old-fashioned value. The root word of “conservative,” as Preston Manning points out, is “conserve.” Rural Canada is home to picturesque natural beauty and is the place where we grow things or extract them from the earth. Our Canadian identity is centred on place: cliff jumping into a lake, shinny on the pond, ice fishing, strapping onto the back of a snowmobile and hitting the trails.
All this to say—rural Canadians love nature. Many—a majority—worry about climate change. We certainly worry about suburban sprawl encroaching onto our farmers’ fields.
Yet, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has effectively cast the carbon tax as the original Liberal sin behind, or at least exacerbating the affordability crisis. Clearly—with due respect to Liberal partisans and earnest economics professors—he has won that debate. He shifted the centre back to his frame. In 2019 and 2021, strong climate action was a shibboleth for being a serious candidate for PM; less than four years later, it is an albatross.
As I’ve argued before, the “centre” is not some fixed place on the map like Mecca. It is instead a liminal space created, and the job of political leaders is to bend the public imagination to their conception of the centre. The job of political leadership is to take the initiative, set the frame and persuade.
Trudeau did that in 2015. Then, PM Stephen Harper was the one who seemed out of touch. A decade later, Poilievre fought on what was a Liberal strength—credibility on the climate—and turned it into a disadvantage, a byword for being out of touch with economic anxieties.
This dynamic started, and remains especially true, in rural Canada where, to put it quite simply, it is not always possible to shift consumer behaviour to avoid the tax. Range anxiety means you cannot rely on an EV to get around out in the country.
Sure, the Liberal government had a “rural top-up” on the carbon-pricing rebate, but it does not apply to every rural community (shoutout to my Tory MP, if he’s reading, who made fighting for our town to qualify for the rural top-up his passion project last year).
Climate action has unfortunately become a question of what it’s going to cost when it should be about how it can save us all money and create jobs.
Next month, our town has a municipal climate strategy coming forward for approval. All its elements aim to reduce emissions—and save money.

A horse is seen in a field near Buffalo Pound, Sask. on Thursday, May, 24, 2018. Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press.
The plan is predominately about energy efficiency and retrofitting buildings. Having a plan to make our infrastructure more resilient could help us reduce skyrocketing insurance premiums. And quantifying GHG emissions in procurement will be a “backdoor” way to help prioritize local businesses, notwithstanding trade-deal prohibitions against “buy local” policies. How? Awarding the contract to a local company means less emissions than giving it to an out-of-town company.
I explained this to a local paving company owner. He paused and said, “That sounds like some Trudeau bullshit.”
“Yes,” I said. “Trudeau bullshit that’ll make you money.”
These are rural values in action. It’s the old-fashioned principle of darning your socks but extrapolated to retrofitting older buildings to save money on utilities. It’s the small-town ethic of supporting your neighbour’s business. It’s also a de facto response to Trump-style U.S. protectionism. And it protects the planet while saving money.
On delivery
There are two tensions in delivery in politics: investments to improve quality of life versus cost-of-living challenges. Ask most people and they will say they want investments made to fix our health-care system, roads, schools, and countless other public services. And they would like it done with their taxes going down, too, please and thanks.
The key to unlocking this dilemma is economic growth. And rural economic growth can, in part, be driven by delivering on measures to improve quality of life, from building more housing and transportation networks to increasing affordable childcare access.
But the tone matters too. Progressive politicians, in particular, need to be vigorous about minding the public purse. Sweating the details and having an obsession with finding efficiencies in the budget—beyond cutting a Disney+ subscription—has to be a constant focus.
Successful progressive leaders made their economic stewardship, reforming of government services, and fiscal discipline a central focus. And they linked how fiscal discipline and investments in social programmes can create a virtuous circle: better transit improves productivity, and more childcare increases workforce participation. You sometimes have to spend money to make money.
Housing is our generational affordability challenge today. Many rural voters can be cast as opposed to housing development. But this misstates things: rural residents are against sprawl, not building more homes per se.
Indeed, the adage “grow up, not out” is also about economics in that improving rural main streets often involves investments to upgrade the public realm, but also requires adding residential density into the downtown cores. To paraphrase Jane Jacobs, it’s not enough to bring customers to rural downtowns; you have to put them there.
I realize there are those who would argue that a focus on delivery is insufficient to gain a hearing from rural voters, that the divide is about identity. To that, I would simply say—what’s the alternative? Getting things done to make a positive difference in people’s lives is the job of any public official. Is it a political panacea? No, but it’s still table stakes for good politics.
As PPF’s research highlights, rural voters are far more likely to feel disconnected from government, with two-thirds of rural Canadians agreeing that they have little influence over government policy. That’s why a focus on actually getting things done could be so persuasive.
All things considered
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the modern backsliding in rural areas for progressives didn’t happen instantly, either. Indeed, it was a bit like bankruptcy: slowly, then suddenly all at once.
Obama’s campaign guru, David Axelrod, has started to speak about how Democratic politicians purport to care about the rural working class but approach working-class voters like missionaries or anthropologists. That rings true in Canada, too.
It’s time for progressive politicians to learn the lessons of defeat. Show up, listen, hear the disconnect on culture, on climate, and on delivery, and commit to finding a way to bridge this divide. Will it be easy? No. Will it work entirely? Perhaps not. But doing better in rural Canada matters—both electorally and in terms of legitimacy. We cannot become a movement of urban, educated elites.