Harper writes off Ontario
JOHN BARBER
November 22, 2007
Conventional wisdom says the Harper government has "written off Toronto." The recent Hazel McCallion eruption against Ottawa suggests the government might also have written off the whole seat-rich Golden Horseshoe. This week's performance by Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan shows the government fully prepared to write off the entire province.
Mr. Van Loan's defence of Bill C-22, a brazenly anti-Ontario electoral gerrymander, was openly contemptuous of not only Premier Dalton McGuinty - who rightly complained about the bill - but virtually all Ontarians who failed to elect Conservatives in the last election.
The content of the new bill helps explain why the government feels so confident in behaviour that might seem reckless: It deliberately targets and saps the voting power of the same constituents the government is most willing to "write off." Thus the Tories will pay the political price of their coup in devalued dollars.
They can afford to behave as if we don't matter because, once Bill C-22 and other mooted reforms come to fruition, we won't.
There is no reason to plumb the shallows of Mr. Van Loan's argument that one-person, one-vote is a sacred principle universally applicable everywhere except in Ontario, which history demands be cheated - and that Mr. McGuinty is a "small man" for objecting to such treatment.
"That's unfair, and there's no way to justify it," the Premier replied.
He's right, end of discussion.
To get some perspective, imagine any federal government treating Quebec the same way, in policy or insults. The only thing that makes treating Ontario that way possible is the fact that so many other Canadians, especially Quebeckers, support it.
They may differ on how best to accomplish the task, but Canadians from every other region agree that the purpose of democratic reform is to suppress the influence of Ontario. Even the Supreme Court has blessed the most corrupt gerrymandering in that cause.
The result, according to Professor Sujit Choudhry of the University of Toronto, is a gaping mismatch between demographic reality and political representation.
In a paper last year, Prof. Choudhry argued that visible-minority Canadians were the biggest losers in the national game of urban vote dilution, which had created an apartheid-like image of the electoral franchise. The good news is that Bill C-22 will fix that for non-white and urban Canadians living in British Columbia and Alberta. But the target remains, intensified, and it is us: the country's most populous, ethnically diverse and, in absolute terms, fastest growing urban region.
The province estimates 11 new ridings would appear in Ontario if it were to achieve parity with the western provinces. Almost all of the new seats would go to the 905. In terms of numbers at least, the city region could not fail to be seen, felt and known in Ottawa.
To understand how strong an impact one-person, one-vote could have on Canadian politics, consider the extraordinary efforts taken to pervert the formula. The Conservatives aren't even trying to justify their bias, content to substitute insults for argument. They know the Liberals, fearing a Quebec backlash, will let them get away with it.
Prof. Choudhry applauds Mr. McGuinty for daring to be the small man out. "The province has twigged to the fact that ultimately the distribution of power in the House of Commons directs the shape of public policy," he said, adding that Mr. McGuinty is the first Ontario premier in memory to embrace the cause.
Then again, the discrimination has never been more outrageous.
jbarber@globeandmail.com