When the city of Toronto was looking at changing it’s wards, they considered lining up the wards with the 25 federal and provincial wards but found the population imbalance between ridings was too high. So it was right away discounted and instead they considered a 26 ward system where it matched up with the federal and provincial wards but then split up a couple of them as they added one more ward to downtown Toronto.
The provincial wards were based off of the federal wards which were already out of date from the quickly growing Toronto population. They were made based off a old census data (2006?) while the city of Toronto was looking forward at not just the current population but the projected population (2020?) since it’s such a moving target with so many new condos and so much growth.
The federal wards are set to be revised after the upcoming 2019 election based on the new population.
So basically not quite the gerrymandering we see in the US, but certainly the system that Doug Ford forced in takes away power from more liberal downtown Toronto and gives more power to the more conservative suburbs.
That said, I agree with the rest of your points that Trudeau is not responsible for the rise of Doug Ford. Basically that is the fault of Ontario Liberals and Kathleen Wynne. Wynne should have realized that her disapproval rating was too low and stepped down for another leader to take over the party.
Also what the Ontario Liberals were not expecting was the rise of the Ontario NDP party as an alternative to the Liberals. That really split the center and left-wing vote which allowed the PC party to win so many seats with just 40% of the support.
