Rural Election Coverage Disappearing

“National media coverage of rural Canada during elections is thin, and local outlets are disappearing. The overall quality of Canadian debate suffers.” So says Barry Wilson in the online magazine policyoptions.irpp.org as a long time rural resident myself I cannot help but agree and so will highlight a few of Mr Wilsons valid points below, the link above will take you to the full article.

Reaching voters thinly spread across large areas with often-poor internet connectivity can be a daunting and expensive task. But rural voters represent a powerful electoral force. When the voter base in a constituency is just a fraction the size of densely populated urban ridings, winning over an individual rural voter can carry more election-day weight than garnering the support of three or four urban voters.

Certainly its harder for candidates to get their message out in rural areas be it via the internet or in person due to both the distances involved and the reduced communications infrastructure however I disagree that the voter base size has much impact. A quick look at the chart of voter populations vs individual riding reveals that there is little correlation within each province, there is a difference between provinces however with the less populated provinces having as much as half the number of voters per riding.

However, if election coverage in 2019 follows the well-established historic pattern, rural issues and analysis will receive scant detailed attention.... Besides, national election outcomes rarely are decided in rural Canada, and a commitment to spend limited resources on expensive, in-depth rural issues research is a hard sell. For rural voters, the scant coverage of their issues means their infrastructure, income or market access concerns will lack the broader political attention needed....

Even the rural candidates themselves rarely talk much about 'local' issues the order of the day for most candidates be in in rural areas or larger centers seems to be regurgitating the party line of their particular 'leader'. Given that said 'leader' (or more accurately his handlers) 'vetted' said candidate before letting him stand under their polotical banner this is hardly surprising!

Meanwhile, the challenges and costs of investing in infrastructure and services for low-density populations spread over vast distances add complexities that do not exist when programs are delivered to concentrated urban areas.

“The reality is that the per capita costs of providing services in rural areas is far higher than providing comparable services in urban areas and the political payback is less because there are fewer people benefiting,”

Its the old story, the squeaky wheel get the grease and noises from rural areas seem to get lost in the cacophony issuing from urban populations.

“The local community paper, although an increasingly rare breed, is the best vehicle for covering local issues, and people read it cover to cover,” he told me. “Urban outlets try, but they quickly find rural issues are complicated, demands and needs are different than in urban ridings and reporters don’t have the background.”

A factor in the limitations of rural election coverage is the steady erosion of rural media outlets and independent voices. As in urban Canada, the number of rural media outlets is falling, centralized ownership is increasing and newsroom budgets are tightening.

“The erosion of rural media outlets and independent voices.....” The 'erosion' hardly covers it, how about the elimination? Sure there are paper published is some larger rural communities but they are by enlarge owned by and much of the content 'controlled' by multinational newspaper chains. The truly independent LOCAL paper is a rare breed indeed, as is LOCAL online community news coverage (although I see some encouraging developments of 'citizen run initiatives' in this area). Is it little wonder that rural issues receive so little attention.

One final note here about what is meant by 'rural', Statscan defines it as settlements of under 1000 folks or with less than 400 folks per sq km which certainly does not include many areas in 'rural riding's' which include many communities defined as Rural and Small Town having less than 100,000 occupants which then included small cities which clearly are not rural. In short its hard to say what is and is not a 'rural riding' and even harder to separate issues of 'small town' residents from those from true 'rural' folks, each with somewhat different issues that need addressing. Is it any wonder that someone elected to represent this diverse population at a legislature overwhelming comprised of 'big city folks' has difficultly getting anyone to understand the various complexities of rural communities!

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Take a deep breath ....whilst you still can.

On the day Premier Doug Ford pulled Ontario out of an international clean energy trading market, it spelled the end for 227 emissions-reducing projects across the province, reveals a leaked document....It is but a small example of the short term thinking and anti green mindset of the Frord regime.

According to the leaked document, in Ontario, the money was set to fund 120 commuter cycling programs (each worth $25,000) in 120 jurisdictions across the province. It was set to help develop 41 green social housing programs, and 20 improvement or retrofit projects for social housing apartments. It was also going to go toward 11 electric vehicle charging stations and one electric-bus pilot in the city of Brampton (Canada's ninth largest city).....

According to the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario (ECO), whose office the Ford government shuttered earlier this year, cap and trade raised almost $2.9 billion in government revenues from six auctions since January 2017 — $2.4 billion up to March 31, 2018, and $472 million in the final May 2018 joint auction with California and Quebec. The money was tracked in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account (GGRA) and used to “fund, directly or indirectly, costs relating to initiatives … that are reasonably likely to reduce, or support the reduction of greenhouse gas.”.........

In California, cap and trade funds have been collected from polluters and spent to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the state spent US$1.4 billion on such efforts, investing in everything from electric cars, solar panels and clean energy transit lines. These programs have helped clean the air of pollution that makes people sick — reducing particulate emissions by 474 tons in 2018. The fund is also being used to reduce the amount of water that Californians use and to plant millions of trees...........

In Ontario, the cancellation of cap and trade is shown as lost revenue in the Ford government's first budget. It is mentioned only four times in the 382-page financial document, with few details about where the cap and trade funds the government had in its coffers had been spent. (In previous interviews, Ministry of Environment spokespeople have said the remaining money in the cap and trade coffer will allocated for "wind-down costs.").....

The preceding is just a few highlights from an article published a few weeks ago which can be seen in full at https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/07/09/news/exclusive-doug-ford-didnt-tell-you-ontario-cancelled-227-clean-energy-projects

Add to this Jason Kenney’s (tax payer funded) inquiry into that “foreign-funded defamation campaign” against Alberta’s fossil fuel industry and you can clearly see that the right wing oil (tar) lovers are in full cry! (see https://albertapolitics.ca/2019/07/albertas-foreign-funded-fossil-fuel-defamation-inquisition-stand-by-for-an-expensive-gong-show/)

 

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Democracy in danger?

Given the title of this blog I must ask the question is our very democracy in danger from the proliferation of discourse on social media, whether true or not, about our political leaders and their various 'platforms'. I will freely admit that being one of the rare individuals that has no social media presence himself and thus only see media reports about some of the political mud being thrown in such places as Twitter and Facebook that my perception could be totally skewed from reality. That said, it seems to me that anybody can say anything about the various 'platforms' put out by the established parties whether true or not and much of the rhetoric gets picked up and amplified by the users of said social media.

The disinformation on such media would seem to be totally over the top, uncontrolled and without any accountability for such untruths, the twit in chief to the south Mr Trumph being the greatest spreader of such lies. Once the election period starts the political parties themselves will have some restrictions as to expenditures and can be challenged about glaringly partisan lies, but what of similar similar lies and partisan BS on social media? Our MSM, the newspapers and TV stations, are less restricted in what they can (and do) say than the political parties themselves but still can be held legally responsible for published information, individuals on social media not so much.

Is the ease with which anyone no matter who they are or where they live (including foreign entities who would like to destroy our democratic systems) can spread their opinions a good thing in promoting dialog or a dangerous thing with the potential to give those who would destroy or subvert our parliamentary system a foot in the door. I don't know, but I sure see some troubling trends developing.

The current situation in the U.S. and Great Britain is as much the result of the spread (by the twit in chief and facecrap) of dissenting, often inaccurate or misleading, opinions by both political pundits and their social media followers as the very questionable output from said 'leaders'. So far it has not reached such epidemic proportions here in Canada but I see an alarming trend in the increase of such disinformation spread by such means.

A fellow blogger who writes about democracy wrote a commentary yesterday upon the current state of affairs at https://billlongstaff.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-vote-cbc.html which promotes the CBC as perhaps the only remaining 'neutral' MSM, whilst I would hope its not that quite that bad yet I cannot help but agree that it is increasingly looking bleak in that regard.

As an old man who has been kicking around on this ball of dirt we call earth for more than 70 years have I just started seeing more clearly or simply become much more cynical? Or is my strong dislike and distrust of 'social media' coloring my concern that rhetoric will overwhelm common sense? You decide!

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