Editorial: Using Hillier to beat up on us

Jeff Green | Oct 06, 2011

Editorial by Jeff Green

Reading through the coverage of the provincial election that will end its dreary run today, one of the sideshows has been a number of articles in both the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail about LFL&A incumbent Randy Hillier.

The Globe and Mail even dispatched a columnist, John Ibbitson, to interview Hillier supporters in Carleton Place and Hopetown. The resulting article “Meet Hudak's booming - but minimized - voice of rural Ontario” poses and then rejects the idea that a comparison can be drawn between Randy Hillier and Lanark Landowner supporters and the Tea Party movement in the United States.

Here is an excerpt from that article that caught my attention.

“The truth is, there is no discernible Tea Party within Ontario politics. There is only a dwindling rural population 'who have been bypassed by the urbanization of Ontario,' observes Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

“Some within it embrace a 'rural populism' that is 'suspicious of the urban experts who know what’s best for us,' he believes.”

A retired couple from Hopetown and a sawmill owner in Lanark Highlands were interviewed as well, and they dutifully said that Mr. Hillier “tells it like it is” unlike the “citiots” who are migrating to Eastern Ontario from places like Ottawa and Ontario.

The column also talks about Randy Hillier's disdain for “the excesses of environmentalism, multiculturalism, publicly-funded health care and the like”.

As long as Hillier sticks to talking about urban indifference to rural reality and mindless bureaucratic interference in rural life, he represents a large constituency in Eastern Ontario. It is when he sways into ideological territory that he loses a number of us.

Back in 2005, the ideological side of Mr. Hillier and the Lanark Landowners movement was identified in this newspaper.

At that time the founding statement of the Landowners was posted on their website, and included the following - “Using taxpayers’ dollars, our governments support and promote Quebec, Native, Arts, Homosexual, Urban and Multi cultures. However when it comes to the independent, peaceful rural culture in Canada, government support is stifling, suffocating and controlling.”

All of this, and Randy Hillier's subsequent actions, have formed a major part of Liberal candidate Bill MacDonald’s campaign message, which is only fair since just about everything Randy Hillier does is on the public record. MacDonald has called Hillier an “embarrassment”.

But Bill Macdonald is a political opponent of Randy Hillier’s and is trying to win an election.

Mr. Ibbitson is a commentator however, and by focusing on Hillier and his supporters’ ideological bent and ignoring completely any consideration of the real issues that are faced in Eastern Ontario, he effectively writes off the people who continually struggle to keep their families fed and their communities alive in this region.

And there are real issues in this region that are worth fighting for.

The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation did indeed decide that sugar shacks should be taxed as industrial operations.

It is in the interest of urban Ontario that farms and forests thrive, but it is the rural ratepayers who foot the entire bill to keep farm and managed forest tax rates low.

Based on the Provincial Policy Statement, which favours an urban model of housing development, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs is forcing restrictions on new housing developments in rural municipalities that will further erode the potential for growth.

The OPP has been permitted to continually downgrade its services to our regions while increasing costs, and ambulance service remains a touchy issue.

Whoever wins the provincial election tonight will inherit a set of grievances in rural Ontario.

The urbanization of Ontario was not created by any government; it is a fact of life. But governments have indeed placed bureaucratic restrictions in place over the past 10 to 15 years that have hit smaller and poorer communities hard. Many of these have been motivated not by any plan that is geared to fostering strong rural development, but by institutional thinking and fear of financial liability. The Safe Drinking Water Act is a prime example of this kind of legislation.

Whether people arrived in eastern Ontario 10 years ago, or 20, or come from families that have lived in rural Ontario for 100 or 1,000 years, we all have a real interest in the future of our region and we look to government and to our urban neighbours for support and respect.

We will find out tonight if Randy Hillier will continue to be the one who is charged with bringing our concerns to Queen's Park.

Whether he is or not, we need governments to take those concerns seriously, because we will not simply fade away, as some urban newspaper columnists are predicting.