Ajax—Pickering, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Ajax—Pickering

Ajax exists because of a war. In 1941 the federal government built a shell-filling plant here, run by Defence Industries Limited and the largest such operation in the British Commonwealth, with a company town of some 600 houses spread across a 2,846-acre site; at peak more than 9,000 people worked there. The place was named for HMS Ajax, one of three British warships that took on the Admiral Graf Spee at the River Plate in 1939. The riding pairs that town, now a fast-growing Durham Region suburb, with the northern and eastern portions of the City of Pickering, taking in rural country around Brougham, Greenwood, Whitevale and Claremont while leaving the lakeside and southwestern parts of Pickering to a neighbouring seat.

Candidates

Mark Holland (Liberal) — Born in Pickering in 1974, Holland took political science and history at the University of Toronto and served on both Pickering council and Durham regional council from 1997 until his election to Parliament in 2004, acting as mayor for a period and pushing the redevelopment of the town's waterfront. Returned in 2006, he became one of the Liberal caucus's most aggressive Question Period performers and held the public safety and national security critic's post, a file that kept him in conflict with the government over crime legislation and police funding. He had also pressed Transport Canada over the future of the federally held land in north Pickering, and was seeking a third term.

Rick Johnson (Conservative) — Johnson had sat on Pickering council since 1988, first as a local councillor and from 1991 as a regional councillor, giving the Conservatives a candidate with two decades of municipal service in a riding the party had targeted without success in 2004 and 2006.

Bala Thavarajasoorier (NDP) — Thavarajasoorier, of Ajax, stood for the New Democrats, who had not been competitive in this corner of Durham Region since the riding was created in 2004.

Mike Harilaid (Green Party) — A film producer living in Pickering, Harilaid stood for the Greens, a party polling better in suburban Ontario in 2008 than in any previous federal contest.

Kevin Norng (Christian Heritage), a contractor from Claremont, and Stephanie Wilson (Libertarian), a student from Pickering, also appeared on the ballot.

About the Riding

Ajax counted 90,167 residents at the 2006 census, up 22.3% in five years — more than three times the provincial rate — and the growth showed in new subdivisions, school construction and strained road capacity. After the war the former plant site briefly housed an overflow campus of the University of Toronto's engineering faculty for returning veterans, which ran from 1946 until 1949, and Ajax was incorporated as a town in 1954.

The rural north of the riding carries an unresolved federal question. On 1 March 1972 Ottawa expropriated 18,600 acres in north Pickering for a proposed airport that was never built. Transport Canada still owned the block in 2008, farms operated on it under lease, and residents had spent three decades without a decision either way.

Employment patterns run outward as much as inward. Highway 401 and GO Transit's Lakeshore East line carry commuters west into Toronto every day. The Ajax and Pickering hospital, part of the Rouge Valley Health System, anchors local health services, and retail and service employment has spread along Kingston Road and Highway 2. Ontario Power Generation's Pickering nuclear station draws staff from across the riding, though the plant itself stands beyond the western boundary in Pickering—Scarborough East.

The autumn campaign arrived with the region's manufacturing base under visible strain. On 3 June 2008 General Motors announced it would end production at its Oshawa pickup truck plant, putting as many as 2,600 jobs at risk in a plant that drew workers from across Durham. That announcement, the financial turmoil of September and October, commuter transit expansion and the airport lands question shaped what candidates were asked about at the door.