Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Elgin—Middlesex—London

Running from the southern edge of London down through Elgin County to the Lake Erie shore, Elgin—Middlesex—London combined a small manufacturing city, productive farmland and a string of lake ports across 2,652 square kilometres. It took in all of Elgin County — St. Thomas, Aylmer, Port Stanley, Port Burwell, Dutton, West Lorne and Rodney — plus Thames Centre in Middlesex and the part of London south of Dingman Creek and Southdale Road.

Candidates

Joe Preston (Conservative) — Preston had held the seat since 2004, when he unseated the Liberal member Gar Knutson. He built and ran Wendy's and Boston Pizza franchises in the area with his wife Geri, and had been involved with the St. Thomas and District Chamber of Commerce, the United Way and the city's downtown development board before entering federal politics.

Suzanne van Bommel (Liberal) — Van Bommel ran an agri-food business and a restaurant and lived in Belmont, northeast of St. Thomas.

Ryan Dolby (NDP) — Born in Chatham, Dolby moved to St. Thomas in 1994 and was living in the village of Shedden. He worked at the Lear Corporation plant in St. Thomas and held union office with CAW Local 2168 as benefits representative, trustee and chair of its political action committee, joining the union's national employment insurance committee in 2006. He had studied at the University of Windsor and was completing a labour studies certificate at McMaster.

Noel Burgon (Green) — Burgon worked in telecommunications in London.

The Christian Heritage Party nominated Carl Hiemstra, an Aylmer farmer, and the Canadian Action Party Will Arlow of Straffordville; Michael van Holst, a London teacher, stood as an Independent.

About the Riding

St. Thomas spent the campaign absorbing the collapse of its manufacturing base. The Sterling Trucks assembly plant on the city's edge had cut a shift and about 600 jobs in April 2007, and on 17 July 2008 the company said it would eliminate one of the two remaining shifts and lay off a further 720 workers in November as freight demand fell with the North American economy. A few kilometres west, Ford's St. Thomas Assembly plant at Talbotville in Southwold Township had built cars since 1967 and by 2008 was turning out the Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car. The Crown Victoria had been withdrawn from retail sale after the 2007 model year and was built only for police forces, taxi operators and other fleets, and Lear's seat plant, which supplied Talbotville, was tied to the same demand. Together the two assembly plants and their suppliers accounted for several thousand jobs in a city of about 36,000.

Agriculture across Elgin County was going through its own restructuring. The sand plains straddling Elgin, Norfolk, Oxford and Middlesex are Ontario's flue-cured tobacco belt, and on 1 August 2008 Ottawa announced more than $300 million for the sector, most of it a transition program paying growers about $1.05 per pound of production quota on condition they left the crop permanently. The rest of the county grows corn, soybeans, wheat and processing vegetables, and Aylmer supports a substantial Low German-speaking Mennonite community, most of whose families came from Mexico from the mid-1970s.

The lakeshore adds a third economy. Port Stanley's beach and Port Burwell's marina draw summer visitors, and the Erie Shores wind farm — 66 turbines opened in April 2006 along twenty-nine kilometres of shoreline through Bayham and Malahide and east into Norfolk County — made the area one of the first parts of Ontario with utility-scale wind generation. Federal questions here came down to help for laid-off manufacturing workers and to farm income supports.