Bramalea—Gore—Malton, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Bramalea—Gore—Malton

Two municipalities share this Peel Region seat. The Brampton portion covers Bramalea, Gorewood Acres, Colerane, Ebenezer and Woodhill in the city's north and east; the southern arm reaches into Mississauga for Malton, Marvin Heights and Ridgewood, ending at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Its 143 square kilometres held 152,698 residents at the 2006 census, 27.4% more than five years earlier.

Candidates

Gurbax S. Malhi (Liberal) — Born in 1949 in Chugha Kalan, in the Moga district of Punjab, Malhi worked as a realtor in Brampton before winning the seat in 1993. He was returned at every general election that followed and stood in 2008 for a sixth consecutive term. From 2001 until the Liberals left office in 2006 he was parliamentary secretary in turn to the ministers of Labour, Industry, Human Resources and Skills Development, and National Revenue. He was sworn of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada in 2003, and had received the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal the year before.

Stella Ambler (Conservative) — Ambler was born in Etobicoke in 1966 to Italian immigrant parents and studied psychology at the University of Toronto, at St. Michael's College. She worked as a political adviser to the Ontario government and later as director of regional affairs for the Greater Toronto Area in the office of Jim Flaherty, the minister responsible for Ontario. She lived in Brampton.

Jash Puniya (NDP) — An information technology professional from Brampton.

Mark Pajot (Green Party) — Pajot worked as a health promotion officer and lived in Thornhill.

Frank Chilelli, a Brampton teacher, ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party, as he had in 2004 and 2006.

About the Riding

Bramalea was laid out in the 1960s by Bramalea Consolidated Developments on Chinguacousy Township farmland and promoted as Canada's first satellite community. Its sections were built in alphabetical order, so the street names still record the sequence of construction, and the name was stitched together from Brampton, Malton and "lea," an old word for meadow. The township civic centre and the Bramalea City Centre mall went up facing one another from the late 1960s and remained the commercial anchor of the Brampton half.

Malton's history runs the other way. Settled around 1820 and named for a town in North Yorkshire, it was overturned in 1937 when land agents acting for the Toronto Harbour Commission bought out the farms to the south for an airfield. National Steel Car's plant there was expropriated in 1942 and became the crown corporation Victory Aircraft, building Lancaster bombers; A.V. Roe Canada took it over in 1945 and built the Jetliner, the CF-100 and the Arrow there. De Havilland, Douglas, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing worked the buildings in turn until they were demolished in 2005.

By 2008 the assembly halls were gone and the work around the airport had changed shape — air freight, customs brokerage, warehousing, and the industrial parks along Highways 427 and 410. The riding also held Brampton's largest factory: the Chrysler assembly plant on Williams Parkway East, opened by American Motors in 1986 as Bramalea Assembly and building the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger by 2008. Malton GO station put commuters on the line into Union Station.

Immigration was the dominant federal file at the door. Family reunification backlogs, sponsorship processing times and the recognition of foreign credentials mattered in a riding where a large share of households had arrived within a decade, and settlement agencies argued their funding had never tracked the growth. The autumn's financial turmoil sharpened all of it in a local economy tied to air cargo, trucking and vehicle assembly, where a slowdown in cross-border freight showed up in paycheques within weeks.