Hamilton Mountain, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Hamilton Mountain

Hamilton Mountain covered the plateau above the escarpment brow — the part of the city residents simply call the mountain — in about 35 square kilometres. Its northern edge followed the escarpment itself; West 5th Street and the Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway closed it off on the west, the Red Hill valley and Mountain Brow Boulevard on the east, and a hydro corridor just south of Rymal Road on the south. Inside those lines lay postwar streets, mid-century plazas and subdivisions still being built out toward the Glanbrook farmland.

Candidates

Chris Charlton (NDP) — Charlton was born in Dortmund in 1963 and came to Canada with her family in 1975. She studied at the University of Western Ontario and took a master's degree in political science at McMaster. She advised the Ontario New Democrat government during its term in office, later worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto, and was Director of Community Relations with Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Canada. She had run federally in 1997 and 2004, provincially in Hamilton Mountain in 1999 and 2003, and for city council in Ward 7 in 2000 before winning the seat on 23 January 2006 from Liberal Bill Kelly. The following Parliament she spent on protection for workers' pensions and on seniors' issues.

Terry Anderson (Conservative) — Anderson was an insurance broker and managing partner at StoneRidge Insurance, living at Mount Hope. He served nine years as alderman for Ward 7 on the old City of Hamilton council, elected in 1991 and returned in 1994 and 1997, until municipal amalgamation ended the council in 2000. Ward 7 sat squarely on the mountain, and the recognition that came with it was the basis of his campaign.

Tyler Banham (Liberal) — Banham grew up on the mountain and went to Sherwood Secondary School there, then to McMaster and to the University of Ottawa for his law degree. Before returning to Hamilton he worked in Ottawa under the Chrétien and Martin governments, including for finance minister Ralph Goodale. He was called to the Ontario bar in 2006 and was practising law in the city.

Stephen Brotherston (Green Party) — Brotherston, a retired Hamilton resident, represented the Green Party.

About the Riding

Concession Street, along the brow, carried Henderson General Hospital and the regional cancer centre beside it — a large employer and the referral point for oncology across a wide area — together with one of the mountain's older shopping strips. Getting down to the lower city meant one of a handful of cuts and access roads, the Jolley Cut, the Sherman Access and the Claremont Access among them, with the Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway skirting the southern edge. Congestion on those links was a standing municipal grievance.

Retail on the mountain had shifted decisively to Upper James Street and to Lime Ridge Mall, the largest shopping centre in the city. Residential development continued southward, and the line between the built-up plateau and open farmland moved each year.

The social mix made the seat genuinely competitive: unionised industrial workers who commuted down the escarpment to the steel plants, retired tradespeople, public-sector professionals, small business owners and newer families in the southern subdivisions lived within a few blocks of one another, which left the riding sensitive to whichever issue dominated a given campaign.

In the autumn of 2008 that issue was the economy. Manufacturing employment in the lower city had been eroding for years and the credit crisis threatened to accelerate it. Alongside jobs, the questions raised most often concerned the security of company pension plans, the adequacy of the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada Pension Plan for an ageing population, the cost of home heating, and the perennial frustration with transit between the plateau and the lower city.