Cambridge, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Cambridge

Three nineteenth-century mill towns make up the riding's namesake city. Galt, Preston and Hespeler were amalgamated as Cambridge in 1973 and each kept its own centre — Galt's stone Victorian downtown on the Grand, Preston where the Speed empties into it, Hespeler upstream to the north-east. Add the Township of North Dumfries and the village of Ayr to the south-west and the riding runs from Highway 401 down into farm country at the southern edge of Waterloo Region.

Candidates

Gary Goodyear (Conservative) — Goodyear was born in Cambridge in 1958. He studied biomechanics and psychology at the University of Waterloo, then qualified in chiropractic at Toronto's Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, graduating cum laude as class president and delivering the valedictory address. From 1984 he ran a Cambridge clinic as its director for two decades, co-designed a three-year postgraduate sports fellowship programme, served as public relations director and later president of the College of Chiropractic Sports Sciences, and wrote a health column in the Cambridge Times for a decade from 1986. He unseated Liberal incumbent Janko Peric in 2004 by a margin confirmed only on a recount, was named Ontario chair of the Conservative caucus, and was re-elected in 2006. He chaired the Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs until opposition members carried a motion of non-confidence in his chairmanship in March 2008.

Gord Zeilstra (Liberal) — A businessman living in Cambridge.

Max Lombardi (NDP) — An information technologist living in Cambridge.

Scott Cosman (Green Party) — A marketing executive from Cambridge.

About the Riding

Cambridge is a manufacturing town and has never pretended otherwise. Its largest single employer was Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, whose first Cambridge plant opened on 30 November 1988 and built 153 vehicles before the year was out. A second plant followed in 1997, and in September 2003 the south plant turned out the first Lexus assembled anywhere outside Japan. By 2008 the Cambridge complex was building the Corolla, the Matrix and the Lexus RX, and Toyota's third Ontario plant, at Woodstock, was weeks away from starting RAV4 production.

That made Cambridge something of an outlier in a bad year. Through 2008 the Detroit automakers were cutting shifts and closing plants across southern Ontario while the Japanese assemblers held up better, and the gap between them was felt through a supply chain of stamping, tooling, plastics and metal-fabrication shops spread across Waterloo Region. Factory work accounted for a far larger share of employment here than in Ontario as a whole, so the exchange rate, trade policy and any federal response to the automotive downturn carried unusual weight locally. Employment insurance rules and access to retraining came up wherever a supplier had announced short weeks.

The Grand River runs the length of the riding, and its floodplain has long dictated where Galt and Preston could build; the Grand River Conservation Authority's dams, dykes and trail network are a visible presence in the city. Highway 401 crosses the north end of Cambridge and Highway 8 links it to Kitchener and Waterloo, though the city guarded an identity distinct from the region's larger centres. Its three old cores meant three downtowns, three heritage districts and three sets of local expectations about where public money should go.

In North Dumfries the agenda was different. Dairy, poultry and cash-crop farms put supply management and farm income programs into the conversation, while the township's position along Highway 401 kept the conversion of farmland to industrial and residential land on the local agenda. Water quality in the Grand watershed, drawn on by the farms upstream and the cities downstream alike, connected the two halves of the riding.