Kingston and the Islands, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Kingston and the Islands

Where Lake Ontario funnels into the St. Lawrence, Kingston sits at the junction of the river, the lake and the southern end of the Rideau Canal. The riding took in the city itself together with Wolfe, Howe and Simcoe islands offshore. Limestone civic and institutional buildings from the nineteenth century, when Kingston briefly served as capital of the Province of Canada, still define the downtown.

Candidates

Peter Milliken (Liberal) — Milliken was born in Kingston on 12 November 1946, the eldest of seven children of a local physician, and descended from Loyalist settlers in the area. He took a degree in political science and economics at Queen's University in 1968, read jurisprudence at Wadham College, Oxford, and completed a law degree at Dalhousie in 1971. Called to the Ontario bar in 1973, he became a partner at the Kingston firm Cunningham, Swan and lectured part-time at the Queen's business school until 1981. He won the seat in 1988 by defeating Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Flora MacDonald, later chaired the Commons committee on procedure and House affairs, and became Deputy Speaker after the 1997 election. He was elected Speaker of the House of Commons in January 2001 and returned to the Chair in 2004 and again in 2006, only the second Speaker in Canadian history to preside while sitting on the opposition benches. In May 2005 he broke a tie on a budget bill treated as a matter of confidence — the only occasion on which a Speaker has cast the deciding vote on such a question.

Brian Abrams (Conservative) — Abrams, of Kingston, carried the Conservative nomination in a riding that had not returned a member from outside the Liberal Party since 1984.

Rick Downes (NDP) — Downes worked as an elementary school vice-principal. He had served as a trustee on the former Frontenac County Board of Education and for several terms as the Kingston city councillor for the King's Town district, and he ran for mayor of Kingston in 2006.

Eric Walton (Green Party) — Walton grew up abroad in a foreign-service family and settled in Kingston, graduating from Queen's in political studies in 1983. He co-founded the travel firm Odyssey while still a student, later started a log-home building company and helped set up a family medicine clinic downtown, and was a founding member of the Kingston Environmental Action Project. He had carried the Green banner here in 2006 and campaigned this time on subsidised green housing as an anti-poverty measure.

About the Riding

Kingston's economy rested on public institutions to an unusual degree. Canadian Forces Base Kingston, the hub of Canadian Army communications, doctrine and training, was the largest employer in the city, its roughly eight thousand military and civilian personnel counted together with those of the Royal Military College of Canada. Queen's University came next, followed by Kingston General Hospital, the local school boards and Correctional Service of Canada, whose Kingston Penitentiary and cluster of other federal institutions made the city a national centre of corrections. St. Lawrence College and Hotel Dieu Hospital added to the institutional payroll, and private employers were fewer but substantial, among them the INVISTA chemical works, Novelis and the head office of Empire Life.

Federal budget decisions therefore reached further here than in most ridings: granting-council funding mattered to Queen's, procurement and force posture to the base, correctional policy to a large payroll. Waterfront redevelopment and the cost of housing in a student city were the standing municipal arguments, and the Rideau Canal, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, anchored a summer tourism trade shared with the Thousand Islands downriver.

One question was specific to this seat. The duties of the Chair kept Milliken in Ottawa for much of the parliamentary calendar and required him to stand apart from partisan combat, and his opponents raised the trade-off between the prestige of the Speakership and the time available for constituency work.