Burlington, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Burlington

The riding took in the built-up part of the City of Burlington, everything below Dundas Street and Highway 407; the rural north of the city, up on the escarpment, belonged to the neighbouring Halton seat. Burlington counted 164,415 residents at the 2006 census, about 9% more than in 2001, with a median age of 40.3 years — older, and with a much smaller immigrant population, than the fast-growing suburbs further east. The seat had returned a member of the governing party at every election since 1984.

Candidates

Mike Wallace (Conservative) — Wallace studied political science at the University of Guelph. He was elected to Burlington City Council in the autumn of 1994 for the city's south-east ward and re-elected in 1997, 2000 and 2003, twelve years at the municipal table. He ran federally for the new Conservative Party in 2004 and lost to Torsney, then took the seat from her in 2006, and went into the 2008 campaign having held it for a single Parliament.

Paddy Torsney (Liberal) — Torsney earned a bachelor of commerce at McGill in 1985, worked as a special assistant in the office of Ontario Premier David Peterson until 1989, and spent four years after that as a senior consultant at Hill and Knowlton. She won Burlington for the Liberals in 1993, ending two decades of Progressive Conservative representation, and held the seat in 1997, 2000 and 2004. She was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of the Environment from 1998 to 2000 and to the Minister of International Cooperation from 2004, and chaired the Commons special committee on the non-medical use of drugs, which in 2002 recommended decriminalising possession of small amounts of cannabis. Stéphane Dion appointed her deputy principal secretary in his office in 2007; she left in April 2008 to seek her old seat back.

David Laird (NDP) — A Burlington social worker, Laird had carried the New Democratic banner in the riding in both 2004 and 2006.

Marnie Mellish (Green Party) — A retired teacher and law clerk from Burlington.

About the Riding

Burlington sits on the shelf of land between the escarpment and the lake at the head of the Golden Horseshoe, and access has always been its advantage. The Queen Elizabeth Way, Highway 403, Highway 407 and Highway 6 pass through or meet nearby, and three GO stations — Aldershot, Burlington and Appleby — serve the Lakeshore West line. That made the city both a commuter town and a place firms chose for its own sake.

The employment base was more industrial than the city's reputation suggested. Meat processing, pharmaceuticals and communications all had a footing: Fearmans Pork on Harvester Road, the Canadian operations of Boehringer Ingelheim on the South Service Road, and Cogeco's cable division were among the larger private employers, with the city and the school boards the largest public ones.

Physical expansion was constrained by design. The escarpment above the city is a UNESCO world biosphere reserve crossed by the Bruce Trail; the lake bounds it below; and Halton's rural north was protected from development, along roughly the line that also formed the riding's northern edge. Planning argument therefore ran toward intensification and waterfront use rather than greenfield subdivision.

Federal questions in 2008 followed from those constraints. Cleaning up Hamilton Harbour, protecting the escarpment lands and the 2,700 acres of marsh and woodland held by the Royal Botanical Gardens at the city's western edge, and adding capacity on the Lakeshore West GO service were standing files. So was the economy: with the dollar high and American orders falling away, Burlington's manufacturers faced the same squeeze as the rest of southern Ontario, and the Liberal carbon-pricing proposal drew close scrutiny in a place built on long commutes and freight-dependent employers.