Alberta's neighbours saw their own stark rural-urban election splits in new political reality
Polarization in the West appears more pronounced but is part of global trend
The day after leading the United Conservative Party to a majority government in Alberta in May 2023, Premier Danielle Smith was asked by CBC Power & Politics host David Cochrane how she viewed the results.
The election saw Smith's party dominate in the rural parts of the province but struggle in the two major cities in Alberta, getting shut out of Edmonton and claiming the minority of seats in Calgary. Smith noted the party was represented in mid-size cities such as Medicine Hat and Lethbridge but acknowledged what appeared to be a new reality.
"What I did see is that the left is consolidated now in our province. It really is a two-party province in a way that it hasn't been in the past," Smith told Cochrane.
Take a look at a map of the province's electoral results and you'll see the visual split: deep blue swaths covering large envelopes of the rural heartland of the province — communities like Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie, known for their energy, agriculture and resources. The UCP took 37 of the 41 seats outside of Calgary and Edmonton.
Pops of NDP orange, though visually overwhelmed by blue, include the urban strongholds of Calgary and Edmonton, home to the majority of the province's population. The NDP took all 20 seats in Edmonton, and 14 of the 26 in Calgary.
More than a year later, Alberta's neighbours to the east and west voted in similarly striking splits in their respective elections.
Addressing supporters in Vancouver on Oct. 19, British Columbia Conservative Leader John Rustad didn't need a victory to claim that the political landscape in the province had shifted forever.
The B.C. NDP performed stronger in urban areas such as Metro Vancouver, while rural and interior regions moved to the B.C. Conservatives.
"How does it feel now to have [the] Conservative Party rocking British Columbia?" Rustad said.
Saskatchewan also saw this dynamic play out Monday night, though some races remain too close to call. The Saskatchewan NDP won big in the cities of Regina and Saskatoon, but the re-elected Saskatchewan Party locked up most of the rural parts of the province, as well as ridings in smaller cities.
In Manitoba, another similar split occurred as part of the election last October. Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew won a majority after taking control of the key battleground of Winnipeg, as well as the northern part of the province. After his victory, he reached out to rural Manitoba, largely behind the Progressive Conservatives, asking those residents to keep an open mind to his government.
All of the election results suggest a phenomenon across Canada's Prairie provinces, said Brendan Boyd, an assistant professor of political science at MacEwan University in Edmonton.
"There's a certain amount of homogeneity now across the Prairie provinces, in terms of the way the partisan politics shake down," Boyd told the Calgary Eyeopener last Monday.
Boyd suggests the rise of the Conservatives in B.C. could provide an opportunity for Alberta's United Conservatives, who could see in the resurgent party a kindred spirit on energy and environmental issues, and, on a macro level, a potential ally against what those parties may view as ongoing federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction.
But beyond those immediate realities, what is potentially at play here tracks with a broader trend that political scientists and researchers have been writing about in Canada for years: the "urban-rural divide."
Shifting priorities
It's not just been limited to the Canadian Prairies. The 2021 federal election was won by the Liberals largely due to their performance in the cities, while the Conservatives showed their strength in rural regions.
After that election, Jack Lucas at the University of Calgary and David Armstrong and Zack Taylor at Western University tracked how support for major political parties was concentrated in urban and rural areas through time.
"What did we find? A steadily widening urban-rural divide in support for the Liberals and Conservatives since the early 1990s," the authors wrote, adding that the rural-urban gap between the two parties was greater in the 2019 and 2021 elections than at any point in the country's history.
The urban-rural divide has also been studied in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. Broadly speaking, the idea suggests urban centres are increasingly in support of left-leaning, progressive parties, while rural areas have tended to break more for conservative platforms.
British Columbia's recent split
The NDP used to have considerable support in physically remote, low-density places in Western Canada that had strong unionization and were dominated by extractive resource industries — and that included northern B.C. and large parts of the B.C. Interior, said Richard Johnston, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
But in Johnston's view, as the party started to become more aligned with urban, socially progressive interests, rural interests began to find it less appealing. At the same time, support for the B.C. Liberal Party, now called B.C. United, diminished.
The B.C. Conservative Party's popularity rose, sharing a resemblance to other conservative parties in Canada, being a "populist party with strong affinities with small town, rural places."
As it matures as a party, the B.C. Conservatives will naturally go through internal disputes, much like conservative parties have historically in Alberta, Johnston said.
"But it's entirely possible that, as in Alberta, the countryside will rule in terms of the policymaking and the leadership selection of the party," said Johnston, who was the Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation until his retirement in 2020.
As mentioned, the stark urban-rural split seen in the last B.C. election isn't unique to that province. But in Johnston's view, they reflect broader societal changes like the growth of the university-educated class and a decline in manual labour jobs, which has created cultural tensions.
"We think of B.C. politics as historically very polarized anyway, but that was a polarization historically more on class lines," he said.
"It's now becoming more like geography, lifestyle and education than cosmopolitanism generally, you might say."
Saskatchewan NDP's rural roots
In Saskatchewan, the divide is starker than it has been for some time, said Tom McIntosh, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Regina.
That hasn't been the case historically. Past NDP governments, such as those led by Allan Blakeney and Tommy Douglas, all had support in rural Saskatchewan.
But since the end of the Lorne Calvert NDP government in 2007, there hasn't really been an NDP presence in rural Saskatchewan, McIntosh said.
"That's one of the problems that the NDP has had, is that they've let their rural roots wither to the point where there aren't enough people of prominence in rural communities willing to run for the NDP under their banner," he said.
The divide creates governance challenges, in McIntosh's view, and often leads to a lack of effort to listen to people on the other side.
"It just reinforces that 'us-versus-them' kind of mentality," he said.
Overstated or not?
On last week's episode of CBC's West of Centre podcast, recorded prior to the Saskatchewan election, Alberta political strategist Corey Hogan said he has long believed that the rural-urban split has been somewhat overstated.
In Hogan's view, the challenge is less about regions being inherently urban or inherently urban; it's more about how progressive views tend to accumulate in downtown centres and become less concentrated moving outward.
"That, to me, is the bigger problem. It's not urban-rural, it's almost like city centre, everywhere else," he said.
Pollster Janet Brown said the urban-rural divide is often viewed in black-and-white terms, when it's more subtle than that. Not everyone in rural areas holds the same view, just like not everyone who lives in an urban area holds the same view.
At the same time, most people in rural areas are more likely to hold certain views than people in urban areas, and vice versa.
"When it comes to elections, what might be a 60-40 split, urban versus rural, becomes a 100-100 split when you translate that into seats," she said in an interview.
The road ahead for Alberta
Extractive and resource industries have historically been important in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta. But when it comes to Alberta's most significant extractive industry — oil and gas — there has tended to be lower rates of unionization, and less of an affiliation with left parties, said Lisa Young, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
"There has been some. But certainly, it is a different sort of set of trajectories. Which suggests that if we're seeing this pattern changing … something else is driving it," Young said.
The struggle for parties of the centre-left is that they think of themselves as being the parties that represent workers, Young said. In Canada, some of the strongest unions today are unions of public sector workers.
"Those are often workers who are professionals, so nurses, teachers, for example," Young said.
"That pushes us in the direction of left-of-centre parties relying on support from people with post-secondary education, who are often located in urban areas."
The B.C. Conservatives' strong performance in the recent election also highlights some of the sociological similarities between the eastern interior of B.C. and the areas on the other side of the border in Alberta, Young said.
"They're similar in terms of their economic base, they're culturally similar to one another, and they're politically similar," Young said.
"You can certainly imagine that people in those places in British Columbia would feel a sense of affinity with Alberta's politics, just like people in cities in Alberta might feel a sense of affinity with some of the politics of the Lower Mainland in British Columbia.
"There are these differences that don't map entirely onto where we've drawn borders between provinces."
In their 2021 report, Lucas, Armstrong and Taylor wrote that as parties become uncompetitive on each others' turf, they'll lose touch with large portions of the population.
"As the parties increasingly represent different social and economic worlds and speak different policy languages, conflicts will only become more entrenched," they write.
Across the West, it's clear that electoral maps are undergoing profound shifts, possibly forever, as Rustad claimed in his post-election remarks.
How politicians build bridges across those divides will test their ability to juggle issues that resonate quite differently in Grande Prairie than they do down the highway in Edmonton.
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With files from Aaron Wherry