Don Valley East, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Don Valley East

Set in the former city of North York, Don Valley East took in about twenty-seven square kilometres between Victoria Park Avenue on the east and Leslie Street, a rail line and Don Mills Road on the west. It reached north along Highway 404 to Finch Avenue East and a hydro corridor above Sheppard, and south to the Eglinton Avenue East area. Don Mills, Parkwoods, Victoria Village, Graydon Hall and Pleasant View make up most of it — a suburban riding of post-war bungalows, mid-century towers and newer condominium clusters.

Candidates

Yasmin Ratansi (Liberal) — Ratansi was seeking a third term. She holds a Certified General Accountant designation and spent close to twenty years with a Toronto accounting firm before a further decade as a consultant conducting operational reviews of federal Crown corporations. Long active in party organisation, she served as treasurer of the Liberal Party's Ontario wing during the 1990s. She won the Don Valley East nomination in 2004 when David Collenette, the riding's member since 1993 and successively defence and transport minister under Jean Chrétien, stood down.

Eugene McDermott (Conservative) — A Crown attorney, McDermott was making his second consecutive run in Don Valley East, having been the Conservative candidate here in 2006.

Mary Trapani Hynes (NDP) — An educator active in local school and education advocacy, Trapani Hynes was new to the riding's ballot; the New Democrats had run a different candidate in 2006.

Wayne Clements (Green) — Clements, who ran a computer business, returned as the Green candidate after contesting the riding in 2006.

Alex Kovalenko, a builder, was the Christian Heritage Party's candidate.

About the Riding

Don Mills is the reason the riding looks the way it does. Laid out in the 1950s as one of the first fully planned suburban communities in Canada, it organised housing, schools, parks and a shopping centre around a set of neighbourhood units, and its pattern of crescents and cul-de-sacs was copied across the country. Its original mall closed in 2006, and through the campaign the site at Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue East was an active construction project, being rebuilt as an open-air retail and residential district that opened the following April.

The area changed substantially after the 1970s. Apartment corridors along Don Mills Road, Victoria Park Avenue and Sheppard Avenue East drew successive waves of newcomers, and by 2008 large South Asian, Chinese, Filipino, Iranian and Caribbean communities lived alongside the original owner-occupied subdivisions. Incomes varied widely between the tower neighbourhoods and the detached streets of Don Mills and Graydon Hall, and settlement services, credential recognition for internationally trained professionals and affordable child care were persistent concerns.

Employment clusters in the Consumers Road business park, bounded by Sheppard Avenue East, Victoria Park Avenue, Highway 401 and Highway 404, one of the densest concentrations of office jobs in the city, and around Fairview Mall at Sheppard and Don Mills. The Sheppard subway, opened in 2002, ends beneath the mall at Don Mills station, and what to do with that stub line was an open municipal and provincial argument: the Transit City plan the city adopted in March 2007 proposed running light rail east along Sheppard from the same station rather than tunnelling further, and federal contributions to any of it were unsettled.

Housing stock is the other defining feature. Much of the rental supply dates to the 1960s and needed capital repair, and tenants in the older towers faced utility costs that rose sharply through 2008. Green space follows the East Don valley and the trail system through Betty Sutherland Trail Park.