Ontario Legislature — Regional Seat Breakdown

I see a lot of (otherwise great) discussions on Twitter about regional dynamics in the Ontario legislature that are based on questionable assumptions on the election of MPPs by region. Here’s my attempt to add some data to the discussion.

There’s a general acknowledgment that urban areas vote differently than rural areas. But defining what an “urban” seat is isn’t straightforward, since many ridings, such as Elgin–Middlesex–London, incorporate both rural and urban areas. For the sake of this piece, I’ll define a “strictly urban” riding as one with a geographic size of less than 200km². Using this definition, there are 68 strictly urban ridings in Ontario and 56 non-strictly urban ridings. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority in both:

Next, we can break up the Urban ridings by region, using the regional definitions from Wikipedia. Our results now look as follows:

Outside of 416/905 Toronto, only 3 Progressive Conservatives were elected in strictly urban areas. They were Amy Fee (Kitchener South — Hespeler), Jeremy Roberts (Ottawa West — Nepean) and Lisa MacLeod (Nepean), all of which are well known to the Autism Community.

I hope this data provides useful context for Twitter discussions.