Premier Dalton McGuinty seems to think he can find all the talent he needs to run Ontario living a few blocks from his office at the legislature.
The Liberal premier already had a cabinet overloaded with MPPs from Toronto ? more than any in history ? and he has added a couple more.
This means many Ontarians who live elsewhere are not getting their concerns heard by the McGuinty cabinet and their remedy may be to move to Toronto.
One ground rule for premiers choosing cabinets traditionally has been to try to give all regions representation roughly equivalent to their populations.
But McGuinty gave Toronto eight out of 23 seats in his first cabinet, more than one-third, although it has only one-fifth of the province?s residents, and by adding two more, he has more ministers from Toronto than backbenchers and they are tripping over each other.
The new appointees are Mike Colle, a competent, enthusiastic MPP who on merit could have been in McGuinty?s first cabinet, but was left out because MPPs in four neighbouring ridings were felt to have prior claims. Now there are five living close together and they could save money by all
coming to work in the same limousine.
The other new minister from Toronto is Laurel Broten, a former parliamentary assistant to McGuinty, whose main mission has been to slip into empty front-bench seats when the TV cameras were on so ministers? absences would not be noticed. She has occupied more cabinet seats literally than anybody in history.
McGuinty represents an Ottawa riding, but the most powerful ministers, of health, education, justice and now environment under Broten, are from Toronto, and the finance minister, Greg Sorbara, second to McGuinty, represents a riding bordering Toronto. So by another yardstick it is far and away the centre of power.
McGuinty has left large areas of central and western Ontario particularly under-represented in his cabinet. He has no minister from the economic powerhouse of Kitchener, Guelph and Cambridge, where the preceding Progressive Conservative cabinet had a deputy premier, Elizabeth Witmer.
McGuinty has only one minister from historically political London, which provided two of the last eight premiers, Conservative John Robarts and Liberal David Peterson.
The two Conservative premiers before McGuinty, Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, managed with fewer Toronto MPPs in cabinet and Harris, no admirer of Toronto, once said he was fed up with it being seen as the centre of the universe.
It would be counter-productive to suggest regions should be represented in cabinet strictly according to their populations, because this would exclude able MPPs who have able neighbours. Ministers also are supposed to treat all areas equitably.
But they push harder to remedy problems they know first-hand and sometimes because their ridings will benefit. Regions without ministers to press their cases lose out.
McGuinty has insulted regions under-represented in cabinet by implying they do not have MPPs competent enough to be ministers and adding Toronto MPPs, despite small-town and rural residents complaining often he neglects them and is generous to Toronto.
Farmers particularly want more cash because prices for some of their products have fallen to their lowest in 25 years and they lack the subsidies major competing countries provide.
McGuinty?s solution has been to switch Steve Peters from agriculture to another ministry, but farmers will suspect he pushed for more money, and ministers from Toronto, whose flowers are growing well on their condo balconies, were not receptive.
Conservative Norm Sterling introduced a private member?s bill to create an eastern Ontario economic development fund to invest money in communities there that need infrastructure and Liberal MPPs scrambled to vote for it.
Many small-town and rural municipalities have said they are tired of Toronto wanting more provincial cash to improve public transit while they have no public transit and a huge divide is growing between them.
One of their complaints is they cannot make their voice heard as well as Toronto?s and this has just got harder.
