Etobicoke North, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Etobicoke North

The northwest corner of Toronto forms Etobicoke North, some 46 square kilometres bounded by Steeles Avenue and the city limits to the north and west, the Humber River to the east, and Dixon Road, Martin Grove Road and Eglinton Avenue to the south. Rexdale is the largest of its communities, joined by Thistletown, Humberwood, The Elms, Kingsview Village, Willowridge and the Mount Olive–Silverstone–Jamestown area. About 108,500 people lived here at the 2006 census, though only around 63,700 were on the list of electors in 2008, a gap that reflects both a young population and the number of households still working through the citizenship process.

Candidates

Kirsty Duncan (Liberal) — Duncan graduated from Kipling Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke in 1985, took a degree in geography and anthropology at the University of Toronto, and completed a doctorate in geography at Edinburgh in 1992. From 1993 to 2000 she taught climatology, meteorology and the science of climate change at the University of Windsor, then joined the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2003 to teach medical geography, and taught corporate social responsibility at the Rotman School of Management. In 1998 she led an expedition to Longyearbyen, Norway, to exhume seven coal miners who had died in the 1918 influenza pandemic in the hope of recovering preserved virus from the permafrost; no viable samples were found, and she described the effort in her 2003 book Hunting the 1918 Flu. She also served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bob Saroya (Conservative) — Born in 1952, Saroya came to Canada from India in 1974, ran several restaurants, and worked as a sales director with Pizza Pizza. Etobicoke North was his first campaign for public office.

Ali Naqvi (NDP) — Naqvi practises immigration law in Etobicoke. He holds commerce, international relations and law degrees from the University of Karachi and a further law degree from the University of Pittsburgh.

Nigel Barriffe (Green Party) — Barriffe grew up in Etobicoke North and worked as a teacher in the community. His campaign concentrated on gun and gang violence, schools, youth employment and housing.

Anna Di Carlo stood for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

This was an open seat. Roy Cullen, the Liberal who had won Etobicoke North at a by-election in March 1996 after Roy MacLaren left for the high commission in London and had been returned four times since, announced in February 2008 that he would not run again, saying it was time for new challenges. Duncan was later confirmed as the Liberal candidate.

Etobicoke North is among the most diverse ridings in the country. More than half its residents were born outside Canada — most often in India, Guyana, the Philippines, Jamaica or Pakistan — and Punjabi is by a wide margin the largest non-official mother tongue, followed by Tamil and Arabic. The riding is also young by Ontario standards, with a median age several years below the provincial figure, and much of its housing is post-war bungalows and rental towers.

The local economy runs on movement and volume. Toronto Pearson International Airport sits immediately across the city line, and the cargo terminals, freight forwarders, catering firms and hotels that serve it employ thousands of residents. Woodbine Racetrack, at Rexdale Boulevard and Highway 27, is a major employer in its own right, between racing, its slots operation and the hospitality around them. Highways 401, 409, 427 and 27 all cut through the riding, supporting a large base of warehousing and light manufacturing that had been shedding jobs through the decade. Humber College's North campus and Etobicoke General Hospital, facing each other on Humber College Boulevard, are the riding's largest institutions. As the economy turned through September and October, the security of that airport and warehouse work was the backdrop to the campaign here.