Far North Electoral Boundary Commission set to get to work on new ridings

A provincial commission will spend the new year looking at creating new ridings in Ontario's far north.

It will be tasked with carving one or two new ridings out of the vast territory currently covered by Timmins-James Bay and Kenora-Rainy River.

The two ridings have only 161,000 people in total, but encompass 589,000 square kilometres between the Quebec and Manitoba borders, and north to Hudson Bay, and includes manyfly-in First Nations communities with no year-round road access.

Mushkegowuk Grand Chief Jonathan Solomon says he hopes the commission will consider how difficult it will be for the new MPPs to travelbetweenremote communitiesor for parties to run election campaigns in these ridings.

"You just can't drop a riding and not have infrastructure in place or the financials in place for the MPP to be able to cover their riding," he told CBC News.

"How are they going to do that? [It's] not going to be cheap."

'There's going to be challenges'

The one or two new northern ridingscould result in the election of the province's first indigenous member of the legislature.

Solomon says he hopes anychanges will make more people in the south think about the far north.

"Most of the MPPs think North Bay is north, or Barrie is north," he said.

"So, if this works out, I think there are good things about it and certainly there's going to be challenges."

The Far North Electoral Boundary Commission will be comprised of a judge, a chief electoral officer, a university professor and two indigenous community members.

Once officially formed, it will have three months to hold public meetings and issue its final report.

The government must present a bill in the legislature by the end of October if the new ridings are to be in place for the 2018 election.