Dufferin—Caledon, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Dufferin—Caledon

Dufferin—Caledon consisted of the whole of Dufferin County together with the whole of the Town of Caledon in Peel Region — 2,293 square kilometres of escarpment, moraine and farmland northwest of the built edge of the Greater Toronto Area. Orangeville, Shelburne, Grand Valley and Bolton are its largest settlements; the townships of Amaranth, East Garafraxa, Melancthon, Mono and Mulmur fill in the rest.

Candidates

David Tilson (Conservative) — Tilson had held the federal seat since 2004, when he took it from the Liberals, and had been in elected office locally and provincially for most of the preceding three decades. Educated at the University of New Brunswick and Queen's, he opened a law practice in Orangeville in 1970, served two terms as a Dufferin County school trustee and six years on Orangeville council, where he was founding chair of the town's blue box program and a director of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. He sat as a Progressive Conservative in the Ontario legislature from 1990, first for Dufferin—Peel and after 1999 for Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, becoming chair of the government caucus in November 1997. He resigned his provincial seat on 2 April 2002 so that Premier Ernie Eves could seek election in the riding.

Rebecca Finch (Liberal) — Finch, a new media executive from Shelburne, was the Liberal candidate in a riding that had been Conservative federally since Tilson's first win.

Ard Van Leeuwen (Green) — Van Leeuwen, a Caledon business owner, was contesting Dufferin—Caledon federally for the first time.

Jason Bissett (NDP) — Bissett lived in Bolton and worked in sales.

Dean Woods, an information technology manager, stood for the Canadian Action Party.

About the Riding

Water organises the geography. The Niagara Escarpment runs up the western side and the Oak Ridges Moraine crosses the southeast, and four river systems — the Credit, the Humber, the Nottawasaga and the Grand — rise within the riding's boundaries. That put land use at the centre of most local disputes. The Greenbelt Plan and the provincial growth plan adopted in the mid-2000s restricted development across much of the area, while aggregate producers sought new licences in the same limestone and gravel deposits. The longest-running of those fights concerned an eighty-nine-hectare property at Winston Churchill Boulevard and Olde Base Line Road in Caledon, where a proposed quarry had been refused by the town and the region and had been before the Ontario Municipal Board for more than a decade, opposed by a residents' coalition drawing support from Peel, Halton and Wellington.

Orangeville, with about 27,000 residents at the 2006 census, is the county seat and the service centre for the surrounding townships, and with Shelburne it accounts for most of the riding's manufacturing employment — auto parts, plastics, metal fabrication and food processing, all exposed to the contraction in southern Ontario manufacturing that ran through the campaign. Shelburne, at the junction of Highways 10 and 89, was growing quickly as buyers priced out of the GTA moved north.

Farming remains the largest use of land. Melancthon and Amaranth grow potatoes and cash crops on the high plateau; Mono and Mulmur carry cattle and horses on rolling country that also supports an equestrian and tourism economy. Caledon's villages — Bolton, Caledon East, Palgrave, Inglewood, Alton and Belfountain — had by 2008 become largely commuter settlements, Bolton the largest.

The federal issues here followed from all of it: rural infrastructure and broadband, the cost of fuel and fertiliser, gas tax transfers for small municipal road networks, protection of headwaters and farmland, and the daily reality that a large share of working residents drove into Peel or Toronto every morning.