So many (urban) pundits writing and yapping after the May provincial election talked about a urban-rural divide in B.C.
Look, they pointed.
The Lower Mainland got behind the NDP, eventually forcing Christy Clark ouf of office and John Horgan into the premier's chair, while the Interior, except for a few outposts in the Kootenays and the North Coast, sided firmly with the B.C. Liberals.
A similar scenario unfolded in Alberta in 2015, where Rachel Notley's NDP ended 40 years of Conservative rule by winning only in Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer, Medicine Hat and Letbridge.
Now that's what an urban-rural divide looks like.
The B.C. explanation ignores Prince George, Kamloops and especially Kelowna, a city well on its way to replacing Victoria as the province's second-largest urban centre.
It also ignores Sam Sullivan and the other Liberal candidates that won seats in Metro Vancouver, as well as the Alberta Conservatives who still won in Calgary.
American and international pundits trying to explain Donald Trump's unlikely ascendance to the presidency rightly ignore the simple urban-rural divide because it is a lazy conclusion that reveals nothing. There is a loose correlation between the number of traffic lights and the height of the tallest buildings in a community to how that community will vote, in Canada and the U.S., but it is both imprecise and ignores more complicated causal relationships.
Americans (and Canadians studying America) are far more fearless about diving into deeper waters, around race, education, religion and class to assess voting patterns. Talking about a rural-urban divide is safe but talking about skin colour, intelligence, faith and wealth in connection to voting is upsetting to our sensitive dispositions. After all, we're Canadians here, right?
Except we're not.
Rural British Columbians have more in common with rural Albertans and both have more in common with rural Americans than they do with folks in Vancouver and Toronto or New York and Los Angeles.
Except it's not where we live that really matters but what we do for a living, who are neighbours are, what our local economy is based on, our culture, our heritage and our relative education levels that counts more.
None of those factors works in isolation, of course. Kelowna's urbanization and wealth has far more in common with Vancouver than it does with Prince George yet Kelowna still acts like Prince George in its general support for small-c conservative candidates federally, provincially and locally.
Kelowna's racial and language makeup, however, has far more in common with Kamloops and Prince George than it does with Vancouver.
Kelowna is still a relatively new urban centre, meaning that its links to its land-based economy (vineyards are still farms, after all) and the culture of hard work, deference to authority and suspicion of identity politics are still largely in place.
It's a flawed and incomplete assessment, of course, but it has far more merit than the rural-urban rationale because it considers more relevant factors and encourages discussion and debate.
The rural-urban explanation does make more sense to urban and rural residents because it provides a handy mechanism for dismissing ideas and the people who hold them.
Anything that comes out of the rural hinterland must be backwards, traditional, racist, sexist and discriminatory. Anything that comes out of the urban centres must be elitist, overly sensitive, impractical, disrespectful and discriminatory.
Ironically, the rural-urban rationale tries to take an analytical approach when there is a simpler explanation available. In the United States, Hillary Clinton drove millions of voters in Trump's waiting arms, as Jim Prentice and the Conservatives did for Notley in Alberta, as Clark did for Horgan.
After economics and education, race, gender and culture, rural and urban factors are stripped away from political results, there is the simple matter of likeability or, as certainly in the case of the three examples above, the comparative lack of likeability of the other candidates and their message.
Voters, regardless of when or where they have lived, have consistently shown a willingness to cast ballots for candidates that don't support their own interests and against the ones that do, out of anger and frustration with the status quo. For those looking for an easy way to sum up most election results, that one holds more water than a rural-urban divide does.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
