Northern Ontario could see some very tight races in next federal election with new riding map

It's official: northern Ontario will send one less MP to the House of Commons in the next federal election.

The approval of the plan by parliament this week comes after many months of drawing and redrawing Canada's electoral map.  "Many I don't think are going to realize that our riding doesn't exist until they go to vote," said Heather Wilson, a former Liberal candidate in the riding of Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing.

It will be split up and swallowed up by three neighbouring ridings and Wilson worries the "uniqueness of northern Ontario" found in the rural areas of the region will be lost when lumped in with the larger cities of Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins.

"I 100 per cent believe that they're going to be watered down," she said.

All three major parties agree that having one less MP in Ottawa will be bad for the north, but the change could be good for some of them in the next federal election.

"We're pretty excited about what that means for us," said Gordan Rennie, president of the Nipissing-Timiskaming Conservative Association.

The riding is gaining the small towns of Englehart, Earlton and Elk Lake, which Rennie says helped "put us over the top" when the Tories last won the riding in 2011, by a margin of just 18 votes.

He says the party's strong poll numbers over the summer, plus the coming retirement of long-time Liberal MP Anthony Rota are also lifting spirits.

"We've done the numbers. We do have hundreds of members of the Conservative Party in the part of Timiskaming that's going to be added to the riding," said Rennie, adding that a few potential candidates are currently "kicking the tires."

"When you put the votes together in the new riding, we're within 5 per cent of the Liberals."

If you look at the numbers from the last few federal elections, the changes to the boundary lines could make some of the races in the northeast much tighter.

Nickel Belt is losing parts of Greater Sudbury that Liberal Marc Serré won by several hundred votes in 2019 and 2021, while adding Espanola and Manitoulin that were won handily by the NDP and where the Conservatives came a strong second in 2021.

The Liberals won Nickel Belt by about 4,000 votes in each of the last two campaigns, but under the new boundaries, they would drop about 2,000 votes, been neck-and-neck with the NDP in 2019 and there would have been a virtual three-way tie in 2021, when the Conservatives jumped up by about 4,000 votes.

Sharon Murdock, a former NDP MPP for Sudbury and now a federal Nickel Belt organizer, says getting name recognition and understanding the issues in these vast new ridings isn't going to be easy for candidates.