Queen’s Park could add 15 MPPs after 2018 election
The Ontario legislature is set to expand from 107 members to 122 after the 2018 provincial election.

thestar.com
Sept. 29, 2014
By Robert Benzie

Coming soon to Queen’s Park - 15 more MPPs.

The Ontario legislature looks set to expand from 107 members to 122 after the 2018 provincial election.

That’s thanks to new ridings expected to be carved out in Toronto, Brampton, Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, Barrie, Kitchener, and Ottawa.

So says Premier Kathleen Wynne in “mandate letters” to cabinet ministers on her expectations for their tenure.

Wynne - whose Liberals won a majority 58 seats in the June 12 election to 28 for the Progressive Conservatives and 21 for the New Democrats - made the pronouncement in her letter to herself as minister of intergovernmental affairs.

“The ministry’s specific priorities include ... working with the attorney general to bring forward a legislative proposal pertaining to Ontario’s electoral boundaries,” the premier wrote.

While political observers have long anticipated an increase in MPPs, Wynne’s letter is the first official announcement of what the government is planning.

New ridings will come into existence in next year’s federal election. Ontario will move from 106 seats in the House of Commons to 121.

The province’s riding boundaries have been closely linked to federal constituencies since former Tory premier Mike Harris reduced the number of MPPs to 103 from 130 in the 1999 provincial election.

In 2005, then-premier Dalton McGuinty made a slight change in order to keep northern Ontario representation up, so there were 11 provincial seats in the north to 10 federal ridings.

That meant there were 107 provincial ridings as of the 2007 election to 106 federal constituencies.

Since Wynne is unlikely to want to reduce the number of northern representatives at Queen’s Park, Ontario would be boosted to 122 ridings, one more legislator than provincial voters send to Ottawa.

Just as poll-by-poll analyses have shown parliamentary redistribution could be politically helpful to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives next year, the new ridings play to the electoral strength of Wynne’s Liberals.

If the June election results were transposed onto the expected 2018 riding map, the Grits’ majority would be even greater thanks to the additional Greater Toronto Area constituencies.

That’s because Liberal MPPs now represent most of the areas that would be contained in the 15 new ridings.