For the first time ever in Ottawa Centre’s history, those who didn’t cast a ballot in the Feb. 27 provincial election made up the majority of the riding’s eligible voters.
Out of 116,980 eligible voters in Ottawa Centre, just more than 58,300 people or 49.85 per cent made the trip to a polling station.
With a provincial voter turnout of 45.4 per cent — second lowest ever in the province’s history — Ottawa Centre did see a participation rate nearly five percentage points above the average, according to Elections Ontario.
That also gave Ottawa Centre the highest voter turnout of all nine Ottawa-area ridings in Thursday’s election.
However, it was still the lowest voter turnout the downtown riding has seen since it was first made a provincial constituency in the 1967 election. And voter participation in Ottawa Centre has never before dropped below 50 per cent.
The highest turnout was in 1990, with 67.17 per cent casting a ballot. In 2022, Ottawa Centre saw a turnout of 50.74 per cent, with 56,074 ballots cast by 110,463 eligible voters.
Turnout in 2022 — the last time Ontarians went to the polls for a provincial election — was more than six percentage points above the average, which was 44.06 per cent. That 2022 election result saw the lowest voter turnout in Ontario’s electoral history, the first in which the majority of eligible voters did not vote.
The 2022 election saw more than a million fewer ballots cast overall in Ontario compared to the 2018 election, despite a steady increase in population over that four-year period.
In 2022, Ottawa Centre ranked sixth out of 123 provincial ridings in voter turnout, behind only Kanata-Carleton (51.38 per cent), Peterborough-Kawartha (51.47 per cent), Burlington (51.63 per cent), Parry Sound-Muskoka (53.09 per cent), Niagara West (53.16 per cent) and Huron-Bruce (54.16 per cent).
In last week’s election, Ottawa Centre NDP candidate Catherine McKenney — a longtime former city councillor and former mayoralty candidate — won the riding with 32,483 votes or 55.7 per cent of all ballots cast, a winning margin of 18,892 votes over runner-up Thomas Simpson of the Liberals.
Progressive Conservative candidate Scott Healey finished third with 9,573 votes and 16.41 per cent support.
McKenney collected 2,172 more votes than predecessor, Joel Harden, did in 2022, when he took 54.34 per cent of all ballots and won by nearly 18,000 votes over his Liberal challenger. The NDP’s Harden is now set to contest the riding in the upcoming federal election.
McKenney’s victory helped give the NDP 27 seats at Queen’s Park and Official Opposition status behind the Progressive Conservatives with 80 seats.
Nevertheless, the NDP total is down from 31 when the election was called. In 2022, the NDP won 23.7 per cent of the popular vote province-wide. This year, the party received just 18.55 per cent of Ontario’s total ballots compared with nearly 43 per cent for the Tories and almost 30 per cent for the Liberals — despite the fact that the Liberals’ strong popular vote translated into only 14 seats.
