Canada’s urban-suburban divide makes for great political theatre

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Will the divide between city and suburb ever be bridged? In Canadian politics, it's the question that matters most. It is also the subject – or at least the subtext – of a play and a new magazine article that speak to that divide.

This weekend, Proud ends its run at Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company. Michael Healey wrote his theatrical study of Stephen Harper for Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. When Tarragon declined to produce the show, Mr. Healey staged the play himself in Toronto last year, and GCTC picked it up for their current season.

The play imagines that the Conservative majority-government victory of 2011 also included a Tory sweep of Quebec. The Prime Minister, played by Mr. Healey, finds himself trying to cope with, and exploit, the streetwise but politically naive new member of Parliament for Cormier-Lac-Poule, who was a restaurant manager before her surprising victory.

The highlight of the play might be a passage in which the Prime Minister tries to explain to the rookie MP his real intentions. He doesn't care about Western alienation or satisfying the aspirations of Quebec, he tells her, or about gay marriage, or the gun registry, or the new prisons he's building, or marijuana or pipelines or Israel or Afghanistan or the Senate or anything else for that matter.

What does he care about? "What I want to do is restrict the rate of the government's growth by a few percentage points a year."

"That's it?" she asks.

"That's my whole thing," he replies. "Then I'm outta here."

But there is, of course, a deeper message. The new MP, Jisbella Lyth, is a single mother who uses sex and her wits for survival.

"What I believe in is myself," she tells the Prime Minister. "…You are the only one who knows what's right for you, and you should never give up that power to anyone else."

The Prime Minister emphatically agrees. "Helping people become self-reliant is one of the things a government can do best," he tells her. That shared conviction bonds each to the other, just as it bonds the government to its supporters.

But of course, self-reliance is not everything. The end of the play fast-forwards to a day when Jisbella Lyth's son is running for Parliament, but not as a Conservative.

"Mr. Harper created a binary state: for us or against us," he explains. "Which is an incredibly efficient way to conduct politics. It's rational. But I think it's a terrible way to serve a country."

Ron Graham would agree. The veteran author and journalist is passionately committed to the thesis that Canada embraces a left-of-centre political culture. How, then, to account for almost eight years of Stephen Harper as prime minister? For Mr. Graham, the answer lies in the Ontario suburbs, which the Conservatives now dominate in tandem with their base of rural and Western support.

In Born in the Burbs: Stephen Harper Explained, which can be found in the October issue of The Walrus (it is also available as an e-book), Mr. Graham describes Canada's culture war. On the one side are the inhabitants of inner-city neighbourhoods, which he describes as "magnets for the creative class, incubators of new ideas, arbiters of taste and fashion, fast-paced, ever changing, cosmopolitan.

"Across the divide lay the culture of the 'lawn people' in the Eden Acres of affordable living, bedroom communities populated by young families with small children, where predictability was valued above originality, conformity above eccentricity, and safety above all."

Stephen Harper, he argues, has flourished by catering to the worst instincts of suburban dwellers: "a witches' brew of grievance, envy, inferiority, insularity, powerlessness, and fear." He waits for the day when the better and more progressive angels of the suburban voters' nature bring them once again into the orbit of the downtown thought-leaders.

You can merge Proud and Born in the Burbs, though both authors might protest. You can construct a political future in which the atomized, disconnected, self-interest-seeking and paranoid-about-safety residents of the cul-de-sacs with their oversized garages awake from their false consciousness. Longing for community, they will embrace the creative, cooperative, enlightened, progressive vision offered by cultural and political elites who live inside the beltways. Together, urban and suburban will unite to send the Tories packing.

If, that is, Mr. Healey and Mr. Graham understand either themselves or those outside themselves as well as they think they do.

John Ibbitson is the chief political writer in the Ottawa bureau.