Don Valley West, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Don Valley West

Don Valley West had no sitting member when the writs were issued. John Godfrey, who had held it since 1993 and served in Paul Martin's cabinet, gave notice in November 2007 that he would leave to head the Toronto French School; his resignation took effect on 1 August 2008. A by-election was called for 22 September, but dissolution on 7 September cancelled it and folded the contest into the general election. Bounded by Highway 401 to the north and Yonge Street to the west, the riding runs south and east to the Don, taking in York Mills, the Bridle Path, the eastern half of Lawrence Park, Leaside, Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park.

Candidates

Rob Oliphant (Liberal) — Oliphant won the Liberal nomination on 2 March 2008 on the fourth ballot. Born in Sault Ste. Marie in 1956, he took a commerce degree at the University of Toronto and a Master of Divinity at the Vancouver School of Theology, and was ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1984, serving congregations in Quebec, Newfoundland and Whitehorse. Premier David Peterson recruited him into the Ontario government in 1989, where he was executive assistant and later chief of staff to two provincial ministers. From 1999 he was part of the team ministry at Eglinton St. George's United Church.

John Carmichael (Conservative) — Carmichael, born in Toronto in 1952, ran City Buick Pontiac Cadillac GMC, a car dealership. He had been the Conservative candidate here against Godfrey in 2006 and was making his second attempt at the seat.

David Sparrow (NDP) — Sparrow worked as an actor, writer and filmmaker and had also been an ambulance attendant. He was vice-president of member services for ACTRA Toronto and sat on the union's national council, pressing for federal arts funding. He had lived in and around the riding for nineteen years, first in Flemingdon Park and later in Leaside.

Georgina Wilcock (Green) — A physician, Wilcock stood for the Green Party.

Catherine Holliday, a registered nurse, was the Communist Party's candidate.

About the Riding

Few Canadian ridings compress such a range of incomes into so little ground. The Bridle Path and York Mills contain some of the most expensive residential property in the country, on ravine lots laid out for estate housing decades ago. A few kilometres southeast, Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park are dense clusters of 1960s rental towers built between the branches of the Don, home to large Pakistani, Afghan, Indian, Filipino and Somali communities and a first landing place for new immigrants to Toronto. Thorncliffe Park Public School held close to 1,900 pupils, the largest elementary enrolment in North America, and twenty portables went up on its playing fields in the summer of 2008. Between the two extremes lies Leaside, a former town of brick houses and shops along Bayview Avenue with a business park along Laird Drive.

Institutions rather than factories drive local employment. Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on Bayview Avenue, home to Canada's largest trauma centre and its largest veterans' care facility, dominates the western side of the riding, and the Ontario Science Centre sits in the Don valley at Don Mills Road and Eglinton Avenue East.

The campaign issues reflected that split. In the tower neighbourhoods they were settlement funding, English-language training, overcrowded schools and the cost of rent and utilities; in Leaside and Lawrence Park, traffic on Bayview and Eglinton, the pace of infill development, and the tax treatment of savings as markets fell through September and October 2008. Transit connected both: the plan Toronto adopted in March 2007 proposed a cross-town line along Eglinton through the middle of the riding, and Ottawa's share was unsettled.