In sending what she calls ‘mandate letters’ to her cabinet, Premier Kathleen Wynne has even sent one to herself as minister of intergovernmental affairs. It seems that she has finally noted the major population shifts in Ontario. She must have been told that the federal election next year will be based on new federal electoral districts in Ontario. Since Ontario pretty well tags along with the same boundaries as most federal districts, Ontario voters have been wondering when some balance will be returned in provincial voting. “Not soon,” Wynne tells herself.
For some reason, Ms. Wynne is not going to bother changing voting boundaries or the number of MPPs until after the 2018 provincial election. With representation based on Canada’s regular census held every ten years, Ontario will not have even one regular election based on the 2011 census before the ridings will again need to be adjusted. Why the Ontario government cannot make the change when the federal government has already done 90 per cent of the work, Premier Wynne does not tell herself.
With six Greater Toronto Area ridings now having populations of more than 160,000 each, they are difficult to represent properly. With the average riding having a population of 106,000, Ontario has been allocated 15 new federal ridings. Without Elections Ontario making the same changes, that means more than 1.5 million people in Ontario are not fairly represented at Queen’s Park. Does Ms. Wynne care?
Whether you agreed with former Premier Mike Harris linking provincial riding boundaries to federal boundaries in 1999 or not, he sure saved Ontario a lot of time, money and needless bickering over riding boundaries. Mind you, it was embarrassing as hell to listen to a bunch of local Conservatives telling the last federal redistribution commission how smart they were when our local Barrie riding was sliced in half and added to rural areas. Nobody seemed to be concerned that it was sure to improve the Tory vote in the new ridings. The local Liberal associations in Simcoe County had no idea how badly they had been rooked.
But it is obvious that Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals are going to do well with the new federal boundaries next year. With Ontario having 121 federal seats, the federal Liberals are in a good position to capture more than 70 of them next year.
It is sometimes surprising to realize Premier Wynne is a poor political strategist.
-30-
Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]