Why city folk, country folk don’t get along
In the fable about the city mouse and the country mouse, the two cousins love each other dearly but discover they don’t like each other’s lifestyles.
The city mouse finds country food not at all to his liking, and the country mouse isn’t fond of being chased by city dogs.
These days, the city mouse-country mouse disparity is called the urban-rural divide, and we’ve got lots of it. In my house, for example, we’re bitter about having to put up with dial-up Internet service while our friends in the City have as much high-speed as they can stand.
On our commute to work each day, we can tell when we’ve crossed the city boundary by the newly paved roads and roadside garbage pickup.
While much of it has to do with have and have-not issues, fact is there are simply different philosophies of life based on different ways of living.
The “divide” is evident everywhere you look these days. Last week, for example, urban council members squared off against their country cousins at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Whistler over the issue of four-year terms.
Observers say it was one of the nastiest debates ever at the UBCM; some even say it proved the organization has become dysfunctional. That might be an exaggeration, but all accounts confirm the gloves came off.
Without over-simplifying it, urban representatives (including Kamloops City Council) favored four-year terms to save money on elections, while their rural counterparts argued against having to commit themselves for so many years.
After two days of debate, the country mice won.
Delta mayor Lois Jackson called it just another example of the urban-rural divide within the UBCM, which insiders say extends way beyond that one vote and deep into the executive of the organization.
This divide between city folk and country folk is becoming so entrenched that future elections may be fought over it. Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to exploit it for political gain in the recent vote on the gun registry when he said the registry amounts to rural residents “being treated like criminals” by their urban cousins.
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has talked about re-inventing the country’s agricultural policies to help bridge the divide. He would do this by creating a national food policy “that puts more Canadian food on Canadian plates.”
Presumably, by providing farmers with more income security and city dwellers with more homegrown food, everybody would get along better.
Nothing illustrates the divide quite so clearly as health care, specifically the quality of health care enjoyed by city folk as compared to what country folk have to settle for. That battle has been waged on the pages of this newspaper for the past couple of weeks after an editorial suggested rural residents should be willing to trade local emergency care for a fast helicopter ride into town.
That didn’t go over well in places like Ashcroft and Clearwater. Comments have ranged from telling us to get our facts straight, to saying we should be ashamed of ourselves.
The divide between city and country has long been evident at the regional district level. The election of Kamloops mayor Peter Milobar to chair the Thompson-Nicola Regional District may have cooled animosity within the board for awhile, but the fundamentals are still there.
For decades, the TNRD has been marked by a Kamloops vs. The Rest relationship among directors. Some rural directors have harboured a passionate dislike of Kamloops for no other reason than that they can.
Beyond issues like health care and high-speed Internet, there doesn’t seem to be anything very rational about the urban-rural divide. Rural people think of themselves as self-sufficient types who enjoy a gentler, friendlier lifestyle free of rules, while urban people are all about sophistication and energy, and dog bylaws.
As Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote the other day, “Those who have opted to live in densely populated areas need third-party authorities to maintain order and figure they’ll trade a little freedom for the convenience and cultural riches of city life.”
Somewhere, sometime, the twain shall meet, a sentiment well expressed in a comment on a website that debated the issue: “I spent most of my life living in the city, and for the past few years I’ve been living in the country. The country folk around here have the same comforts and conveniences that city folk have. The only difference is they have a longer commute to work.
“As for farmers, well, I think the modern farmer would be lost and helpless without his high-tech machines.”
mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca
ArmchairMayor.ca 
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