Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock

At roughly 9,500 square kilometres, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock was among the largest ridings in southern Ontario, running from Lake Simcoe northeast into the Canadian Shield. It comprised the City of Kawartha Lakes, the County of Haliburton, the Township of Brock in Durham Region, and three Peterborough County townships — Cavan-Millbrook-North Monaghan, Galway-Cavendish and Harvey, and North Kawartha. Some 119,100 people lived in it at the 2006 census. Lindsay, Bobcaygeon, Fenelon Falls, Omemee, Minden, Haliburton, Cannington, Beaverton, Sunderland, Millbrook and Apsley are its principal communities.

Candidates

Barry Devolin (Conservative) — Born in Peterborough in 1963 and raised in Haliburton, Devolin read political science at Carleton and took a master's degree at Stony Brook University in New York. He spent years in senior political staff roles — research director for the Reform Party caucus under Preston Manning, chief of staff to Ontario minister Chris Hodgson, education adviser to Premier Mike Harris, and chief of staff to provincial minister Tim Hudak — and ran a strategic communications firm before winning the newly drawn riding in 2004 against three-term Liberal MP John O'Reilly. Re-elected in 2006, he chaired the Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development from that year until dissolution.

Marlene White (Liberal) — White, retired and living at Apsley, carried the Liberal banner in a riding whose predecessor seat had been Liberal until 2004.

Stephen Yardy (NDP) — Yardy was an eighteen-year-old social work student at Fleming College who had been working on New Democratic campaigns since 2006 and was active in the Canadian Youth Assembly and the Ontario Health Coalition. He was among the youngest candidates on the ballot anywhere in the province.

Michael Bell (Green Party) — A publisher from Peterborough, Bell ran on the Green platform of carbon pricing paired with cuts to income and payroll taxes.

Dave Switzer stood for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

This is cottage country in its purest form. Water sets the rhythm of the local year — Balsam, Sturgeon and Pigeon in the Kawarthas, Kashagawigamog and Halls in the Haliburton Highlands — and the Trent–Severn Waterway threads its locks through the middle of it. The permanent population swells enormously between May and October as seasonal residents arrive from the Greater Toronto Area, and hospitality, marinas, construction, retail and trades all follow that curve. What that means politically is a workforce with a long off-season, an employment insurance system that matters a great deal, and a property tax base heavily weighted toward waterfront owners who cannot vote here.

Lindsay, with roughly 20,000 residents, is the commercial and administrative centre: the hospital, the courthouse, the county offices and Fleming College's Frost Campus, which sits on about 150 acres along the Scugog River and houses the college's school of environmental and natural resource sciences. Fleming's Haliburton campus, known for its school of the arts, serves the northern end. Farming remains significant in the west and south — the flat land around Brock Township, Beaverton, Cannington and Sunderland, and the mixed farms near Omemee and Millbrook — while Haliburton County to the north is rock, lake and forest, historically dependent on logging and the cottage trade.

The riding skews considerably older than the provincial average, with retirees drawn by the setting and the cost of housing, and it is overwhelmingly English-speaking. Physician recruitment and emergency room hours, ambulance response times over long distances, the state of rural roads and bridges, and the absence of broadband in the townships are the standing local questions. Highways 35, 7 and 115 carry the traffic south to the GTA and east to Peterborough, and their condition and capacity is itself a recurring grievance.