'Our calls were on deaf ears,' northern Ontario MPs brace for work with one less seat

Carol Hughes, member of Parliament for Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapukasing, said losing her seat at the House of Commons isn't about her.

"It's about losing the representation," she said.

Hughes' individual riding of Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapukasing is expected to be dissolved after the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Ontario finishes revising the province's electoral map this month.

Its biggest proposal includes merging Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapukasing with Timmins-James Bay.

The new federal riding, called Kapuskasing-Timmins-Mushkegowuk, is expected to incorporate 10,000 more people.

The proposal was finalized early in February 2023, after the commission redrew Ontario's map with the hopes of having 116,590 voting age people in each riding.

The latest update by the commission sets the changes in stone and takes one northern Ontario seat out of the House of Commons.

'It's a ripple effect'

According to Hughes, the loss of a seat and combining two major ridings together will create too much ground to cover.

"Having an MP office in almost every corner of every 10 blocks in the city is different than having an office hundreds of kilometres away in a rural area," she said.

The added distance could make services less available and increase wait times as MPs divide their attention to more corners, Hughes told CBC News.

"It's a ripple effect."

She added preserving seats in northern Ontario should be a new priority.

Final approval for the commission's report will be done in September 2023 when the House reconvenes.

If an election is called within seven months, it would be "under the old writings," while the new boundaries would be used if held after that window.

Charlie Angus, MP for Timmins-James Bay, said his role would feel like resetting decades of work if re-elected.

"The commission comes in and says, 'We're just going to cut your riding, shift a whole series of communities into the North Bay region and you're going to take a whole bunch of other communities that you've never been in before,'" he said.

"And now you're going to start over again. It's really hard to build relationships in the north when distance is so great."

More constituents with less representation

Angus added his team offered different solutions to the commission, with concerns Timmins-James Bay would be taking on too much space from other ridings.

"But it seemed like our calls were on deaf ears from the get-go and they came in believing that we weren't entitled."

Both Angus and Hughes said the expansion of Kapuskasing-Timmins-Mushkegowuk drastically increases the outreach by hundreds of kilometres of driving to visit constituents and build relationships.

They added it's less about losing seats to ridings in southern Ontario and constituents having less access to their MPs.

"I haven't even counted how many new towns I have to pick up and start working and being in and building relationships from square one, while all the other communities I'm losing, I'm still expected to continue serving till the next election," Angus said.

"We're now going to have to stretch that much further."