London North Centre, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

London North Centre

Alone among London's three seats, this one had changed hands between general elections. It occupied the middle and north of the city — east of Wonderland Road North and Wharncliffe Road, north of Oxford Street West and the Thames River, and west of Highbury Avenue North — a compact urban riding of roughly 63 square kilometres containing the University of Western Ontario, two of the city's major hospitals, the downtown core and Old East Village.

Candidates

Glen Pearson (Liberal) — Pearson had represented the riding since a by-election held on 27 November 2006, called after Joe Fontana resigned the seat to run for mayor of London. That contest drew national attention because Green Party leader Elizabeth May entered it and finished ahead of the Conservative candidate, Dianne Haskett. Pearson had himself run in London—Fanshawe at the general election ten months earlier. Born in Calgary in 1950, he spent 29 years with the London Fire Department and retired as a captain. For more than 25 years he ran the London Food Bank as its co-executive director, and he sat on the board of the Ontario Association of Food Banks. From 1998 he and his wife Jane Roy worked on schools, community development and campaigns against slavery in Sudan. In the Commons he pressed the government for an accounting of Canadian aid reaching Darfur refugees and southern Sudan.

Paul Van Meerbergen (Conservative) — Van Meerbergen was a business development manager and a sitting London city councillor, first elected for Ward 10 in 2003 and returned at the 2006 municipal election.

Steve Holmes (NDP) — Holmes drove for the city transit system.

Mary Ann Hodge (Green Party) — Hodge was a teacher in London.

About the Riding

The University of Western Ontario sat at the centre of the riding physically and economically. One of the country's larger universities, it brought tens of thousands of students into Broughdale, Old North and the Masonville area each September and employed thousands of faculty and staff year round. University Hospital, on the edge of the campus, and St. Joseph's Health Care to the south formed the other half of the institutional base; the London Health Sciences Centre network was the city's single largest employer and served all of southwestern Ontario.

South of the campus the riding took in the older residential streets of Old North and Carling, the commercial strip along Richmond Street, and the downtown core along Dundas and King. East of Adelaide Street the character changed again: Old East Village along the Dundas corridor was among London's lower-income neighbourhoods. Just off Dundas Street East, the Kellogg cereal plant — in the city for a century by 2008 — remained one of London's best-known industrial employers.

That mix of students, hospital and university staff, downtown professionals and low-income households near the core made this the most changeable of London's seats. It had returned Liberals at both general elections held under the current boundaries, but the 2006 by-election showed how quickly support could move when the party's vote softened.

Local issues heading into October 2008 followed from the riding's composition. Poverty and food security had unusual prominence, in part because of the sitting member's quarter-century at the food bank. Post-secondary research funding, graduate scholarships and student debt mattered where the university was the largest single institution. Health care delivery — surgical wait times, physician recruitment and the continuing restructuring of the hospital network — came up in every campaign. The financial crisis that broke mid-campaign gave the economy late prominence: much of the riding's employment was institutional and comparatively insulated, but London's manufacturing base was not.