Green Issues Splitting Urban, Rural Voters

"In the U.S. and Canadian elections now under way, the traditionally dominant political factors are giving way to a politics in which wedge issues such as John McCain's "drill, baby, drill" and Stéphane Dion's Green Shift program are pitting city folk against high-consumption, low-density rural voters.

Questions of culture and identity have been the principal means by which U.S. politicians are driving wedges between urban and rural voters. In Canada, the consensus-oriented political culture and the higher degree of urbanization has kept the hard wedges from being hammered in.

The rise of environmental politics on the electoral main stage has created a further opportunity for the urban-rural split. Competing with the New Democrats and the newcomer Green Party for urban votes, Stéphane Dion's Liberals have proposed the Green Shift, a universal income-tax cut to be offset by new taxes on carbon users. For someone in a big-city apartment building who uses public transit, the impact will be largely positive. And for rural folks? Mr. Harper has replied to Mr. Dion's plan with a tax cut on diesel — the fuel of choice for agricultural equipment, heavy pickups, motorboats and long-distance trucking — while continuing a very soft approach to global warming.

In the U.S., a clash on environment and energy has run along similar lines."