Brant, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Brant

Brant pairs a mid-sized industrial city with the farm country around it. Brantford, on the Grand River in south-western Ontario, holds most of the riding's voters. The County of Brant supplies the rest — the mill town of Paris, where the Nith joins the Grand, and the villages of St. George, Burford, Scotland and Oakland. The Six Nations and New Credit reserves, immediately south of Brantford, sit inside the riding as well.

Candidates

Phil McColeman (Conservative) — Born in Brantford in 1954, McColeman studied at Kent State University, where he played on the hockey team, and at Wilfrid Laurier University. He spent 24 years running construction and home-building businesses in the city and served as president of the Brantford Home Builders' Association. He had contested Brant for the Conservatives in 2006 and finished narrowly behind; 2008 was his second attempt at the seat.

Lloyd St. Amand (Liberal) — St. Amand studied at Western before qualifying in law at Windsor in 1977, and had lived in Brantford and practised family and criminal law there since 1979. He volunteered with St. Joseph's Hospital, the Brant Waterways Foundation, Big Brothers, Nova Vita Women's Services and the Brant United Way, and was a past president of the riding's federal Liberal association. He won the nomination when Jane Stewart stood down in 2004 and took the seat, chairing the Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development from October 2004 to November 2005 and serving afterwards as associate environment critic.

Brian Van Tilborg (NDP) — Van Tilborg coordinated an adjustment centre in Brantford, an agency that helps laid-off workers into retraining and new employment.

Nora Fueten (Green Party) — Fueten was retired and lived in St. George.

John G. Gots, a retired Port Dover resident, ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Brantford counted 90,192 residents at the 2006 census. Its twentieth-century prosperity had rested on farm machinery — Massey-Ferguson, Cockshutt and its successor White Farm Equipment — and the collapse of that industry in the early 1980s was among the sharpest local contractions anywhere in Canada. Unemployment in the city passed 22% by the end of 1981. A generation later, the derelict factory land along the Grand and the empty commercial blocks on Colborne Street were still unresolved municipal problems.

Recovery came slowly, and from outside. The extension of Highway 403 east to Ancaster in 1997 gave Brantford a direct link to Hamilton and the Toronto region for the first time. Procter & Gamble opened a national distribution centre in the city in 2005, and the Italian confectioner Ferrero started production at its first North American plant there in 2006. Wilfrid Laurier University had planted a campus downtown at the end of the 1990s, putting students and renovation money into buildings that had stood empty.

Outside the city, the County of Brant is mixed farming country — cash crops, dairy and livestock — and Paris drew visitors and retirees to its cobblestone buildings.

Two threads ran through the 2008 campaign. The first was the economy. Brantford's remaining manufacturers faced the same high dollar and collapsing American demand that were pulling down plants across southern Ontario, and a city with a long memory of layoffs listened closely to what the parties said about manufacturing support, employment insurance and retraining. The second was the Six Nations claim to the Haldimand Tract, which had produced occupations and protests at development sites in and around Brantford through 2006 and 2007 and left municipal and federal authorities disputing who was responsible for settling an eighteenth-century grievance. Development approvals, policing costs and land title all waited on an answer.