Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Etobicoke—Lakeshore

Running along the Lake Ontario waterfront at the southwestern corner of Toronto, Etobicoke—Lakeshore covered about 42 square kilometres and held some 114,600 residents at the 2006 census. It stretched from the mouth of the Humber River west to Etobicoke Creek and the Mississauga boundary, reaching inland as far as Dundas Street West and the Canadian Pacific tracks. Mimico, New Toronto and Long Branch — three lakeshore towns absorbed into Metropolitan Toronto in the 1960s — anchor the south end, with Alderwood, Stonegate–Queensway, The Kingsway and the fast-rising Humber Bay Shores completing the riding.

Candidates

Michael Ignatieff (Liberal) — Elected here in 2006 after three decades abroad, Ignatieff came second in the Liberal leadership race held that December and was named the party's deputy leader under Stéphane Dion. Born in Toronto in 1947, he took his doctorate in history at Harvard in 1976 and held posts at Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics before running the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. He returned to Canada in 2005 to a human rights professorship at the University of Toronto. During the 2006 leadership contest he was the first of the candidates to propose putting a price on carbon — an idea that, in Dion's hands, became the central and most contested plank of the 2008 Liberal campaign.

Patrick Boyer (Conservative) — Boyer held this same riding for the Progressive Conservatives from 1984 to 1993. Born in Bracebridge in 1945, he read economics and political science at Carleton, did graduate work at the University of Toronto, practised communications and election law at a Toronto firm, and wrote six legal texts on Canadian election law. In the Commons he chaired committees on election law reform, equality rights and the status of disabled persons, served as parliamentary secretary to External Affairs Minister Joe Clark from 1989 and to Defence Minister Marcel Masse from 1991, and ran for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1993. He went on to found the publishing houses Muskoka Books and Blue Butterfly Books.

Liam McHugh-Russell (NDP) — An articling student, McHugh-Russell carried the New Democratic banner against the sitting deputy Liberal leader.

Dave Corail (Green Party) — A sales representative, Corail contested the seat for the Greens.

Janice Murray stood for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

The riding's character comes from its history as a chain of separate municipalities. Mimico grew up around the railway yards, New Toronto around the factories that lined the lakeshore, and Long Branch as a summer colony that became a year-round town. Each kept its own main street and its own institutions after amalgamation. Along the water at Humber Bay Shores, meanwhile, condominium towers were going up at speed on former industrial land, adding thousands of residents and reshaping the skyline visible from downtown.

No federal seat in the country had a higher share of residents speaking Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian or Croatian at home, and long-established Italian and Portuguese communities and newer Latin American households added to the mix. Humber College's Lakeshore campus, built on the grounds of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, is a large institutional presence, and the Ontario Food Terminal on The Queensway is the wholesale produce market for the province.

The Gardiner Expressway, the Queensway and the Lakeshore West GO line, with stops at Mimico and Long Branch, tie the riding to the city core. Older light industry along the rail corridor had been giving way to residential redevelopment for years, sharpening questions about waterfront access, school capacity and transit as the towers filled in. That the seat belonged to the Liberal deputy leader — and that his party's carbon-pricing platform had started as his own leadership proposal — guaranteed it national attention through the October campaign.