Budget 2025: the Prime Minister’s curious rural blindspot
‘Rural Canada has to be placed at the heart of federal decision-making,’ writes Ken Polk. / UNSPLASH PHOTO
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien used to say that the surest sign that a budget was a political winner was its almost complete disappearance from the headlines after budget day.
On this score, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget has been a success. To the extent that it remains in the headlines through a parliamentary prism of Conservative defections and a bit of legislative chicken on whether the budget will pass. (Spoiler alert: it will.)
Rural Canada on the budget sidelines
As a result, little post-budget commentary has focused on its most glaring omission: the lack of a focused, targeted economic plan for rural Canada; an odd oversight given that Carney’s long-term economic plan will ultimately succeed or fail in rural Canada.
In his pre-budget speech, the Prime Minister repeated that “Canada has what the world wants.” By that, he meant “We are an energy superpower. We start with the third-largest reserves of oil and the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world. We have an 85% clean electricity grid, with vast potential to power the clean economy of the future. We possess one of the world’s largest resources of critical minerals and rare earths.”
As rarely before this Prime Minister adopted the rhetoric of economic nationalism. He called on governments and businesses to look beyond export potential abroad, to nation-building at home: “Our plan, first and foremost, is to build here at home so we can take control of our future.”
He talked of building a Canadian economy, where “we are our best customer.” He suggested that a Canada is possible where Canadians take the lead, as never before, as in financing, extracting, processing, refining, and manufacturing of the great gifts of our natural wealth.
The budget’s title is “Canada Strong.” Yet it contains virtually no targeted measures of support for rural Canada. This, despite the fact that almost all of the major nation-building projects the government has given the highest priority — LNG, new mines and expansions, hydroelectric and wind-power projects — will be developed in remote and rural areas.
It can be argued that, in addition to the major projects announced to date, the array of investment incentives outlined in Budget 2025 will, by definition, benefit rural Canadians, as they will serve as a magnet for investment. The government can also argue that rural communities will be able to access funds to improve local infrastructure through the Build Canada Communities Fund.
A budget for making urban Canada strong
But for rural Canadians, the budget measures behind the Prime Minister’s galvanizing nation-building rhetoric seem to be about making urban Canada strong. The structural emphasis of the budget put the priority attracting global and domestic capital on overdrive.
Without an accompanying rural development strategy, however, the likely outcome of Carney’s plan would be to entrench even deeper rural Canada’s existing lot as a place to be exploited primarily for the benefit of investors in Toronto, New York, London, or Hong Kong and governments in the form of tax revenue. True, there will be rural jobs, but they would, like now, be project-dependent and transitory in all too familiar cycles of boom, bust and abandonment.
Rural Canadians are eager to make use of what the Prime Minister is fond of calling this “hinge moment” to create self-sustaining rural economic growth. They want greater control over the value of their rural resources, as to end chronically underfunded and underserviced education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and digital broadband.
On all counts the budget failed. There is no dedicated fund to improve substandard rural health care and education and infrastructure. The municipal or community-matching requirements for the budget’s infrastructure streams may pose challenges for smaller rural municipalities with limited capacity or tax base.
Rural business has historically faced higher hurdles when it comes to getting access to capital due to limited banking options, higher perceived risk and few opportunities to connect with startup investors. Yet the budget does not explicitly recognize rural and remote SMEs—the primary drivers of jobs and growth—as a distinct category requiring targeted support.
Nor is there additional investment to rural broadband coverage, a key deficit that has long impeded rural participation in the digital economy and will, unavoidably, restrict their ability to take full advantage of the government’s plans to use AI as a driver of innovation and productivity.
The Prime Minister’s failure to see the need for a targeted rural economic development strategy is just the latest example of an abiding rural blindspot for the Liberals. Over the years, the Liberal Party has become increasingly urban and suburban in both outlook and representation.
An explicit rural lens needed
Rural Canada has to be placed at the heart of federal decision-making. That is why the Rural Prosperity Group is calling on Ottawa to review existing policies through a rural lens to unleash growth and resilience and to apply a rural lens to all future policy, program and regulatory decisions, and trade negotiations and agreements.
Budget 2025 is the clearest proof yet that an explicit rural lens is needed if rural Canadians are to be meaningfully included in Prime Minister Carney nation-building vision.
For all of the Prime Minister’s talk about Canada Strong, building up rural Canada has clearly not qualified as a major national project of high priority. This is a major strategic oversight that must be rectified. Carney has time to correct the mistake. The question is, does he have the will.
