Plowing Match primer

Also: Diet diary, picketing the Premier, Ford's photo-op-filled week

ABOVE THE FOLD

TO THE FURROWS — It’s back! The International Plowing Match & Rural Expo — a major event in Ontario politics — goes down in Kemptville this week.

MPPs will swap their blazers and ties for rubber boots and 10-gallon hats to court rural Ontarians, while party leaders hop on tractors to compete for who can plow the straightest furrow.

Top of mind for rural Ontario is something that’s pretty much front and centre for the rest of the province: housing.

JACKIE KELLY-PEMBERTON, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s director for the counties of Dundas, Frontenac, and Leeds and Grenville — where the IPM is happening this year — says she wants to see “smart growth” and “preservation and responsible land-use planning” in order to keep existing farmland. 

According to ROBIN JONES, chair of the Rural Ontario Municipal Association and mayor of the Village of Westport, “housing starts don’t happen in rural Ontario” in part because of the “unintended consequences” of two pieces of prov…