Saskatchewan’s urban/rural divide is a lot older than this election

The following text is an edited excerpt from a yet-untitled forthcoming book on Saskatchewan politics.

The results are in, and despite the provincial NDP making significant gains, Saskatchewan will continue to be governed by the right-wing Saskatchewan Party for the next four years. At the time of this writing, Premier Scott Moe’s party is projected to win 32 seats—one more than the 31 required for a majority—and is leading in three ridings that are still too close to call. The NDP is projected to win 22 seats, and is leading in four close-call ridings. The Sask. Party dominated rural areas, while the NDP cleaned up in urban ones.

Given these results, it is no surprise that we are now hearing a lot of laments for the divided nature of our province, as the storied urban/rural split returned with a vengeance. But the rural-urban divide in Saskatchewan is not some immutable force of nature that returns like the seasons. It has a history—and that history is one of Saskatchewan politicians cultivating and fostering that divide, often for their own cynical electoral purposes.

First, it’s important to state that the urban/rural divide is not unique to Saskatchewan. In fact it has been identified as an important political cleavage in most advanced western democracies, Canada included. In recent years, the divide has gotten a whole lot of attention, primarily because of how it helped propel Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. But while many commentators focus on the urban/rural divide and its consequences as a recent phenomenon, in Saskatchewan, this division has a much longer history—one that, like so much of Saskatchewan politics, begins with former Progressive-Conservative premier Grant Devine, who governed the province from 1982 to 1991.

Devine did not create the rural/urban split in Saskatchewan, but he did pry it wide open for political gain. After the 1986 election, where the PCs were routed in the cities, Devine pursued a distinct strategy of stoking urban/rural divisions to solidify his rural base. While we can point to the PC government’s treatment of the urban poor, its preferential tax policy for rural Saskatchewan or its infamous “Fair Share” program that sought to relocate urban government workers to rural parts of the province as evidence of this strategy, the most important element is how the Devine government presented the NDP to rural Saskatchewan—because it is a narrative that has had impressive staying power, not least due to the actions of the NDP itself.

Devine regularly presented the NDP as an urban party beholden to urban special interests that could not ever represent the interests of rural Saskatchewan. But Devine didn’t just portray the NDP as ignorant or neglectful of rural interests, he portrayed the NDP as a threat to rural Saskatchewan, with actual malicious intent.

In 1987, the province’s electoral boundaries were up for review. However, despite declining populations in rural areas and commensurate growth in urban ones, the Devine government gave instructions to the boundary commission to maintain the number of rural seats—drastically under-representing urban populations. The controversy over the boundaries would solidify the suspicion in urban centres that rural constituencies were once again being disproportionately favoured by the government.

The Devine government did little to dispel this notion, politicizing the boundary changes in the run-up to the election by encouraging its caucus to portray the NDP’s opposition to the changes as a “plan to destroy rural constituencies,” and “reduce the effectiveness of the rural vote.” While the boundary changes did not save Devine in the 1991 election, which saw the PCs relegated to a handful of seats in a sweeping NDP victory, the actions of the Devine PC’s in fostering the urban-rural split had profound consequences going forward.

As an opposition leader, Devine’s stoking of the urban/rural split would only continue. As the Romanow government sought to manage the debt of the Devine years it made a series infamous cuts in rural Saskatchewan, most importantly the conversion and/or closure of those 52 rural hospitals and health centres that continues to stalk the NDP to this day.

While Romanow now concedes that the way his health reform was implemented was a mistake, the political damage had been done. The opposition PC’s would dub these cuts “Roy’s Rural Revenge,” arguing that Romanow was punishing rural voters for their loyalty to the PCs. “It’s part of Mr. Romanow’s revenge,” declared Devine, “rural people defeated him in two elections in 1982 and 1986 and he has just made up his mind there are going to be 10,000 to 20,000 fewer rural people by the next election.”

The PC’s pointed to changes to the GRIP agricultural program, hospital closures, the shuttering of farm service centres and changing electoral boundaries to favour urban Saskatchewan as evidence of the NDP’s vendetta against rural Saskatchewan.“They’ve written it off” declared Devine, “It’s rural revenge. It’s closing hospitals, rip up roads, tax people.”

While no doubt self-interested, we need to be mindful of how this message might have been received in rural Saskatchewan. The stoking of the urban/rural split to convince rural voters that the NDP was a decidedly urban party, captured by urban interests and unconcerned with rural Saskatchewan had been a dominant message throughout Devine’s terms in office. Now, here was proof that the NDP really might harbour animosity to rural parts of the province. How else to explain government policy that seemed to disproportionately target the few remaining public services in rural Saskatchewan?

The “rural revenge” narrative piggy-backed neatly onto the very real experience of rural decline, out-migration and the perceived indifference of politicians that had been ongoing for decades. But while the myriad factors that contribute to rural decline can seem abstract and illusive, the SK NDP effectively put a face and a name to rural decline—Roy Romanow. Whether this is fair is besides the point, the reason that rural enmity to the SK NDP has persisted for so long is that the narrative of rural decline has been successfully pinned to the NDP, both by their own actions and by the popularization of this narrative by the Devine Conservatives and the Saskatchewan Party.

So while rural Saskatchewan continues to experience population decline, the erosion of public services, the concentration and consolidation of corporate agriculture, loss of local business, a virtual media desert and a troubling opioid epidemic, in the minds of many rural residents, this decline is the legacy of the NDP—even if they have been effectively represented by the Saskatchewan party for over thirty years. The manufacturing of the NDP—and by extension urban Saskatchewan—as the enemy of rural Saskatchewan ignited a sense of resentment and suspicion that continues to echo in the province’s politics today.

This animosity would presage what political scientists have come to identify as “rural resentment” in contemporary politics. As Katherine Kramer explains, this is a perspective that “encompasses a strong identity as a rural resident, resentment towards the cities and a belief that rural communities are not given their fair share of resources or respect.”

While the rural resentment theory has become particularly popular as a way to explain the rise of right-wing populism in the past few years, the fact that Grant Devine, whether through political acumen or brute electoral necessity, pioneered the manipulation of this divide almost forty years earlier demonstrates the political utility of this cleavage that continues to shape our provincial politics as it did so starkly last night.