If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau does not ask the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament between now and April 22, as seems likely, the next federal election will be fought with a redistributed and expanded House of Commons. That change offers nothing but trouble for the Liberals.
There will be five new seats in the House of Commons, and the Liberals have little hope of winning four of them. If they lose the fifth, it will probably mean they’ve lost the election.
Based on the results of the 2021 census, provincial electoral boundary commissions have completed the work of adjusting riding boundaries to account for rising and shifting populations, and submitted their final reports to the chief electoral officer. Any election called after April 22 will use the new map of the House, which will grow from 338 to 343 seats.
Three of the new ridings are in Alberta. British Columbia and Ontario get one each. All of the other provinces keep their current representation.
The changes in Ontario are the most interesting. That province’s boundary commission concluded that, to minimize disparities in the population size of each riding, Northern Ontario and Toronto each needed to lose one seat.
Toronto? Isn’t the city growing, with all those new condo towers in the downtown? The city’s population did grow, by 6.9 per cent between 2011 and 2021. But the rest of the province grew by 11.7 per cent in those years.
In order to keep riding populations as close as possible to the quota of 116,590 people per riding, Northern Ontario – which grew by only 2.8 per cent – needed to go from 10 seats to nine, and Toronto from 25 to 24, with a total of three new seats added to the 905 (the ring of burgeoning cities surrounding Toronto named after its first area code).
When the commissioners first proposed taking a seat from Toronto, politicians and residents complained that the city was too diverse and too economically important to lose a seat. But the commissioners noted “these arguments apply with equal or greater weight to constituencies surrounding Toronto, which are on average faster-growing, similarly diverse, and economically dynamic.”
The Liberals took every seat in Toronto in the last election. In the next election, the party will lose a seat the day the writs are issued.
The party will also be challenged in Northern Ontario. Liberal MP Anthony Rota is retiring, and the Conservatives believe changes to riding boundaries in the region work in their favour. (Notwithstanding the lost seat, Northern Ontario is still overrepresented in the House. Its vast size and the presence of Indigenous and francophone communities earn it special consideration.)
The Liberals could win the three new 905 seats. One is in Brampton, one in the Milton area and one is a partly rural riding on the northeastern edge of the region.
But the 905 tends to vote largely as a block, and for decades it has chosen the party that ends up forming government. The Liberals dominated the 905 in the elections of 2015, 2019 and 2021. If Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister, it will likely be because he turned the 905 from red to blue, as Stephen Harper did when the party won a majority government in 2011.
The additional British Columbia seat is located in the fast-growing southeastern Interior of the province, a region typically fought over between the NDP and the Conservatives. As for the three new seats in Alberta – two in the Calgary area, one in the Edmonton area – it’s never good news for the Grits when that Tory stronghold gets more representation.
So in the next federal election, assuming it is called after April, the Liberals will start out with a lost Toronto seat, will be fighting to hold onto what they have in Northern Ontario and will have no real prospect of winning any of the four new seats in the West.
As for the 905′s three new seats, the Liberals will win the election if they win them, and lose the election if they lose them.
At this point, it would simply be cruel to mention where the party stands in the polls.
John Ibbitson