Timmins-James Bay New Democratic MP Charlie Angus is crying foul over planned riding boundary changes.
He says the federal commission handling redistribution is drawing arbitrary lines on a map, intending to cut one riding in the north, where ridings are already large enough.
“Timmins-James Bay is bigger than Germany,” he claims. “And what they’re going to do now is add in Smooth Rock, Mattice, Kap, Hearst, then down to the Tri-Towns, all the way down to Temagami.”
If adopted, Angus says the plan will “screw Northern Ontario over in a big way”, depriving constituents of services and a political voice in Ottawa.
So he’s working across party lines, trying to stop the plan. Angus says we need more than representation by population; we need it based on the region and its interests. He adds that the North should not be pegged to the population based in Southern Ontario.
“We are so fundamentally different than densely populated Southern Ontario and yet somehow, they seem to think we are over-represented, that we have too much voice, and it’s ridiculous.”
A public hearing on redistribution is expected to be held in Timmins.