I definitely hear what
Vamphuntr is saying about how municipalities fumbled the ball WRT the public trust in their management of funds.
There's a very famous news story from Saskatoon about how the city requested federal funding to build a new perimeter road and reduce semi traffic in major highway thoroughfares through the city and the feds told them no. The reason? The city hadn't even finished its last "perimeter road", Circle Drive, which began construction in the 60s and was still missing its southwest section to "close the circle"; the last addition to Circle Drive was built back in 1983, with no further work put into it since, largely due to NIMBY bullshit that caused the city to push it off as a "luxury expense". The feds told the city they would refuse to provide any infrastructure funds for a new project until the city finished Circle Drive, period. So suddenly, like magic, Circle Drive was completed almost 50 years after the project started.
It should not take 50 years to build something of that scale, and yet...
When the news broke, I know my family laughed and basically said City Hall could get fucked. A string of piss-poor choices have stagnated growth in this city for decades, so people are mostly fine with the province managing municipal funds here. It just means when the cities are underfunded, we get a new provincial government pretty soon after.
All that said, I disagree that the rural/urban divide is something related to the current political climate; I can absolutely assure that it's existed for as long as I've been alive, at least.