Ontario election 2018: Ottawa Centre riding

Voters in Ottawa Centre elected Joel Harden of the New Democratic Party as their MPP in the 2018 Ontario election.

Candidates

Liberals: Yasir Naqvi (incumbent)
PC: Colleen McCleery
NDP: Joel Harden (elected)
Green: Cherie Wong

Geography

As its name suggests, Ottawa Centre is the “downtown riding” in Canada’s national capital. It is bordered by the Ottawa River in the north from the Alexandra Bridge in the east to Sherbourne Road in the west, and narrows until it ends just before Nepean Creek.

History

Created in 1966, the riding has elected Liberal candidates since 1995. Liberal MPP and Attorney General Yasir Naqvi won his third term in 2014, securing more than 50 per cent of the vote in the last election. He defeating the runner up, NDP candidate Jennifer McKenzie, by 16,795 votes. His NDP challenger in 2018, Joel Harden, is a supporter of the Leap Manifesto.

By the numbers

A riding with many university students and young bureaucrats (and Parliament Hill), Ottawa Centre grew by 3.9 per cent from 2011 to 2016 – the second highest growth among the five urban ridings. The riding’s median age sits at 38; close to 43 per cent of the population aged 15 years and over isn’t married; and the average household size is 1.9 people (the smallest of the urban ridings). While English is the mother tongue of 68 per cent of Ottawa Centre residents, it’s a still fairly linguistically diverse riding, with more residents reporting their mother tongue as a non-official language than French.