Kitchener—Conestoga, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Kitchener—Conestoga

Three rural townships and one corner of a city made up this Waterloo Region seat. Woolwich, Wellesley and Wilmot wrapped around the built-up area of Kitchener to the north, west and south, and the riding also took in the part of Kitchener lying west of Fischer-Hallman Road. Its roughly 900 square kilometres ran from Elmira and St. Jacobs in the north down to New Hamburg, Baden and New Dundee in the southwest.

Candidates

Harold Albrecht (Conservative) — Albrecht held the seat going into the campaign, having taken it from Liberal Lynn Myers in 2006. Born in Kitchener in 1949, he attended Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School and Waterloo Lutheran University before earning a dental degree at the University of Toronto. He ran a practice in the region for 27 years and joined charitable dental missions to Honduras, Zambia, Nepal and India. He was a Waterloo County Board of Education trustee from 1978 to 1982, taking the chair for his final year, and in 1999 left dentistry to found Pathway Community Church, a Brethren in Christ congregation in Kitchener's Doon area, which he led until 2005. In the 39th Parliament he sat on the government operations and the Aboriginal affairs committees.

Orlando Da Silva (Liberal) — A litigator living in Kitchener, Da Silva took his law degree at the University of Toronto in 1993 and was called to the Ontario bar in 1995. He joined Borden Ladner Gervais as an associate, became a partner there in 2001, and moved to the public service in 2005 as counsel with the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Rod McNeil (NDP) — McNeil was a Kitchener small-business owner.

Jamie Kropf (Green Party) — Kropf worked as an information technology consultant and lived at Baden.

About the Riding

The townships north and west of Kitchener contain the largest Old Order Mennonite settlement in Canada, descended from an 1889 division among Waterloo County Mennonites over how far the church should accommodate modern life. Woolwich Township's largest community, Elmira, counted 8,872 residents at the 2006 census; the businesses along its main street supplied the farms for miles around. A few kilometres south, the St. Jacobs Farmers' Market — begun in April 1975 by eight farmers who merged two livestock yards, and the largest year-round market of its kind in the country — drew visitors from across southern Ontario and the northern United States.

Farming set the tone for much of the riding. Dairy and poultry operations working under Canada's supply-management system sat alongside cash-crop, hog and beef producers, and trade talks touching marketing boards were followed closely here. Wilmot Township's twin centres, New Hamburg and Baden, mixed light industry and services with farm-supply businesses. Wellesley Township kept the most rural character of the three, anchored by the village of Wellesley along with Linwood and St. Clements.

The Kitchener end of the riding was different in kind. Subdivisions west of Fischer-Hallman Road had been filling in through the 1990s and 2000s, and residents there commuted to jobs in the tri-cities' technology, insurance and manufacturing sectors. That growth pressed against farmland at the edges and kept land-use planning a standing local argument.

Federal concerns in the autumn of 2008 tracked the split between the two halves. Farmers pressed on input costs, fuel prices and farm income supports, and township councils with small assessment bases looked to Ottawa for road, bridge and water money. The financial turmoil that broke during the campaign bore directly on the manufacturing employers many commuters in the riding depended on.