Grits look to add ridings
JOSH DEHAAS
Ontario’s Liberal government will soon consider a proposal to add two new seats in northern Ontario.
If you live in the south of the province, that should worry you. Your vote would count for less and your charter rights might be violated. If you’re a Progressive Conservative, it could cost your party the election.
The Liberals set up the Far North Electoral Boundaries Commission in May and asked it to fly around the north consulting on whether to add one or two seats to the electoral map in northern Ontario. The stated goal is to create what Attorney General Yasir Naqvi called “predominantly Indigenous” ridings.
The commission came back with its interim report last month. While the public won’t see the final report until Naqvi makes it public, the plan put forward in the interim report is to chop two huge, far north districts into four, creating four new seats. Two of the seats (Mushkegowuk and Kiiwetinong) would be majority-Indigenous, and one (Timmins) would be about 40 per cent francophone.
The districts’ populations would be very small. Kenora-Rainy River would have 53,010 people; Timmins, 41,788; Kiiwetinong, 32,784; and Mushkegowuk, only 29,687. Assuming voter turnouts comparable to elsewhere in the province, every vote in Mushkegowuk or Kiiwetinong would count for about four times as much as a vote cast in big southern Ontario districts like Whitby, Oshawa or Niagara Falls. A vote in Timmins, meanwhile, would count for about three times as much.
The fact that one Ontarian’s vote could count for three or four times as much as another Ontarian’s vote seems undemocratic on the face of it. But the commissioners argue such a huge variation in population is constitutionally acceptable.
They point to a 1991 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that accepted the Province of Saskatchewan’s decision to create northern ridings with populations as much as 50 per cent lower than the average in the rest of the province, and southern ridings that varied from the mean by as much as 25 per cent.
The commissioners quote Justice Beverley McLachlin, who, writing for the majority in that case, observed that “factors like geography, community history, community interests and minority representation may need to be taken into account to ensure that our legislative assemblies effectively represent the diversity of our social mosaic.” McLachlin also warned, however, that “a system that dilutes one citizen’s vote unduly compared to another citizen runs the risk of providing inadequate representation to the citizen whose vote is diluted.”
The southern Ontario regions that Ontario Liberals would most disenfranchise are in regions that lean heavily Progressive Conservative, while northern Ontario is looking more like a three-way race where the Liberals could make gains. This poll result might even explain why Liberals seem especially focused on Indigenous and francophone issues in recent months — with the latest example being Monday’s announcement that they are creating a standalone Ministry of Francophone Affairs.