The Globe is visiting communities across the country to hear from Canadians about the issues affecting their lives, their futures and their votes in this federal election.
Near the tip of northeastern Prince Edward Island, there’s a small windswept fishing town that earned its name from the hordes of mice that swarmed the community in the early 1700s, destroying the crops of French settlers.
The town of Souris – mouse in French – has maintained its francophone roots, illustrated by the tri-coloured Acadian flag painted on residents’ mailboxes, and the town mascot, a fuzzy gigantic rodent named Morgan. Today, a patchwork of russet-coloured fields quilts the cape and surrounding hills – the place where potatoes are said to grow best in the island’s trademark iron-rich red clay soil, kept cool in summer by the chilly winds off the Atlantic.
The fields near Souris, blanketed by this spring snowstorm, have the same fertile red soil that makes PEI an important supplier of potatoes across North America.
Three hundred years after the mice consumed every last scrap and seed in Souris, the farmers who grow and package potatoes here and on the rest of the island have been dealing with a different plague – the potato wart, a disease caused by a soil-borne fungus.
While it poses no human health risk, the disease decimated the potato-seed export industry and caused massive losses in 2021, when the U.S. banned PEI potatoes for six months after the potato wart was discovered on the island.
Federal restrictions and red tape are still in place to prevent the spread of the potato wart on “spud island,” as the province is affectionately called, but there remains lingering unease among farmers, especially with Donald Trump in the White House. PEI’s potato industry, which contributes $1.3-billion to the provincial economy, has been roiled by on-again, off-again tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S.
In early March, Mr. Trump stood down on his new punishing 25-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods imported under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, while keeping duties on steel, aluminum and automobile imports.
Still, for year-round exporters such as sixth-generation farmer Boyd Rose of East Point Potatoes, those few days of tariffs hit him hard in the pocketbook.
The Trump-imposed levies cost him $20,000 in duties for several loads of fresh potatoes shipped to the U.S. last month – a hit that leaves him bracing for potentially more volatility. He questions what might happen next. What if the President is lobbied by groups that claim the potato wart on PEI isn’t under control? Could the border be closed to PEI potatoes again?
“We have some people in the States that would love to shut us down,” said Mr. Rose. “It’s beneficial to them if we’re not shipping to the States.”
For PEI farmers such as Boyd Rose and his daughter Keisha Rose Topic, the next prime minister's choices about trade and agriculture could have a big impact.
Until recently, the tiny island of 179,000 people was the country’s largest overall producer of potatoes. (Alberta and Manitoba now produce slightly more.) But spuds still reign here with the most potato fields per hectare of land than anywhere else. And there’s perhaps no crop so closely aligned to the culture and people as the potato is to PEI – a cornerstone in the province’s economy, history and way of life.
Years after those mice decimated the poor French farmers’ crops in Souris, British settlers introduced the potato. For four decades before Confederation, farmers sent ships laden with fresh potatoes steaming down the Eastern Seaboard – the beginnings of a potato export relationship with the United States that today is worth nearly $153-million, with fresh potatoes accounting for about 18 per cent.
Today, fresh potatoes like Mr. Rose’s are sold to Walmart in Canada, the fast-food chain Five Guys and a Costco distribution centre in the U.S. Midwest before a seed is even planted.
On a cape just outside Souris, the East Point Potato plant is in full swing – just as it is for 11 months of the year. Potatoes are washed, sorted, bagged and stacked onto pallets, headed for grocery stores, wholesalers, food distributors and packing plants in Eastern Canada and the U.S.
Each week, 50 tractor trailers loaded with potatoes rumble up the road and across the Confederation Bridge, an image that helped bring to life those famous Stompin’ Tom Connors lyrics: “It’s Bud the spud from the bright red mud/Rolling down the highway smiling/The spuds are big on the back of Bud’s rig/They’re from Prince Edward Island.”
As it happens this year, prep for the spring planting season coincides with the federal election campaign. Mr. Rose hasn’t missed a planting in 45 years – a 12- to 15-hour a day job he splits with his daughter, Keisha Rose Topic. He takes the early morning and evening shift, while she goes out in the field when her two young children are at daycare.
Lawrence MacAulay has long represented PEI's Cardigan riding for the Liberals, but he is not running again in 2025.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
In this riding of Cardigan especially, where former two-time agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay announced he won’t be seeking re-election after 37 years as an MP, the question of who can best represent the interests of farmers is of foremost concern.
Many long-standing island families such as Mr. Rose’s tend to vote for the same party as their parents and grandparents. He said his family has always voted Conservative, but he’s not sure what to think any more. Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre seems to be a lot like Mr. Trump, he said, while he finds Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s pledge to scrap the proposed increase to the capital-gains tax an attractive promise. “I don’t know if I’ll be that sad if the Liberals win, to be honest,” he said. “I’m scared of Carney and that he was the guy making snowballs behind Trudeau, but who knows.”
Souris, and the Maritimes generally, are at the mercy of fickle and sometimes destructive Atlantic weather. It's been three years since a hurricane season that devastated homes and businesses in this region.
Ms. Rose Topic, however, has already broken with family tradition, supporting the person and not the party – a local Liberal candidate who’s also a dairy farmer. But she also believes there is more to be done to protect potato farmers and the island’s economy. Speeding up aid from the federal-provincial-territorial AgriRecovery program, intended to help farmers deal with natural disasters, is a big one. After Post-Tropical Cyclone Fiona destroyed crops and demolished barns on the island in 2022, she said farmers waited two years to learn whether they would receive relief.
She also wants a federal government that can assist the potato industry in maintaining economic stability amid crises such as the potato wart. “Obviously we don’t want disease to run rampant,” Ms. Rose Topic said, peeling off a white hazmat suit, after rinsing, pressure washing, bleaching and disinfecting a warehouse to prep for the seed potatoes that will be arriving any day.
“We can’t have everybody storing potatoes in basements any more, but there has to be some kind of economic lens.”
East to West: More election coverage from The Globe
The Decibel podcast
Through the 2025 election, producer Kasia Mychajlowycz is travelling across Canada to ask locals what’s on their minds. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, many spoke of increasing patriotism and anger at Donald Trump, as well as their struggles with cost of living in rural communities. Subscribe for more episodes.
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