Z - PM Fellow: Urban Rural Divide

Sean Speer is PPF's Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow, and Peter Loewen is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

What divides urban and rural voters? What unites them? In this second report on the Urban-Rural divide in Canada, Sean Speer and his team take a closer look at the Canadian Election Study and find that urban and rural Canadians have divergent opinions on many key issues, but they also agree to a large extent on many others. As populism grows across the western world, policymakers in Canada need to understand the implications.

Political polarization is growing across the globe. In this first report on the urban-rural divide in Canada, Sean Speer teams up with Peter Loewen and the University of Toronto’s Policy, Elections and Representation Lab (PEARL) to explore the theory that a “perception gap” exists between those who live in cities, the suburbs and rural communities. How do Canadians' distorted beliefs of one another’s circumstances fuel polarization?

Over the past year, PPF's Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow, Sean Speer has been exploring urban and rural differences in Canada and how policymakers, business and community leaders, and the public can work to bridge the growing cultural, political and socio-economic characteristics of the urban-rural divide.

The economic gap between urban and rural places in Canada is significant and we cannot afford to let distressed communities come to the view that they don’t matter. PPF’s Prime Ministers of Canada fellow Sean Speer stresses the importance of cultivating a shared understanding of urban and rural cultures, and will travel across the nation in order to formulate a policy agenda that can bridge the urban-rural divide.

PPF’s 2019 Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow Sean Speer to study urban-rural divide.