Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Carleton—Mississippi Mills

This seat straddled a municipal line and two ways of living. Its eastern end was Kanata, a planned technology suburb inside the City of Ottawa. Westward it took in the former townships of Goulbourn and West Carleton — Stittsville, Richmond, Carp, Dunrobin, Fitzroy Harbour — then crossed out of Ottawa into Lanark County for the Town of Mississippi Mills: Almonte, Pakenham and the old Ramsay township. The riding was drawn in the 2003 redistribution under the name Carleton—Lanark and renamed before the 2006 election, after Mississippi Mills protested formally against being attached to an Ottawa-focused seat.

Candidates

Gordon O'Connor (Conservative) — O'Connor served in the Canadian Army from 1964 to 1994, commissioned in the Royal Canadian Dragoons and retiring as a brigadier-general. In civilian life he was a vice-president at a facility management company and at a vehicle testing centre before joining Hill & Knowlton as a senior associate; between 1996 and 2004 he was a registered lobbyist for defence contractors including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Atlas Elektronik and Airbus Military. Elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2006, he became Minister of National Defence in February 2006 — a tenure dominated by the Afghanistan mission, a multi-billion-dollar procurement programme, and a dispute over the handling of Afghan detainees, in which he corrected statements he had earlier made to the Commons about Red Cross monitoring. He moved to National Revenue in August 2007 and held that portfolio when Parliament was dissolved.

Justin MacKinnon (Liberal) — A company chief executive living in Kanata.

Jake Cole (Green Party) — A consulting engineer, Cole had lived in Kanata with his wife and two children for close to three decades. He had been the Green Party's candidate here in 2006 and stood again in 2008.

Paul Arbour (NDP) — A software engineer based in Kanata, Arbour sat on the New Democrats' riding association executive.

About the Riding

Kanata began as a private venture. The developer Bill Teron assembled more than 1,200 hectares of farmland in the 1960s and laid out a community of mixed densities, generous open space and neighbourhood commercial centres; by the 2006 census it held about 85,000 people. What made it nationally significant was the Kanata North technology park, bounded by Terry Fox Drive, Herzberg Road, March Road and Goulbourn Forced Road, which was being called Silicon Valley North by the late 1990s.

Nortel Networks and Mitel had anchored that cluster, and by 2008 it was under real strain. Nortel announced 2,900 job cuts in February 2007 and a further 2,100 in February 2008, with about a thousand additional positions shifted to lower-cost countries. By the month of the election its shares had fallen below a dollar and the New York Stock Exchange had warned it about delisting. Thousands of engineers and technicians in Kanata worked either for Nortel or for firms that depended on its orders, and the campaign here was conducted against that background. Scotiabank Place, home of the Ottawa Senators, sits at the western edge of the built-up area.

Past the suburban fringe the riding turns rural quickly. Goulbourn and West Carleton are farm and village country with a heavy commuter overlay, shaped by the Carp Ridge and the Carp and Mississippi rivers. Almonte's stone woollen-mill buildings sit above the falls on the Mississippi.

The two halves brought different lists to the campaign. Rural voters raised broadband access, farm programs, the cost of the long-gun registry and the price of fuel for people driving 40 kilometres each way to work. Suburban voters raised research funding, the future of the technology sector, commuter capacity on the Queensway and — as markets fell through September and October — the security of retirement savings held in company stock.