Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Mississauga East—Cooksville

Compact by GTA standards at about 34 square kilometres, Mississauga East—Cooksville was the part of the city lying east of a line drawn along the Queensway, Mavis Road, Central Parkway East, Highway 403 and Eglinton Avenue East, out to the Etobicoke Creek boundary with Toronto. Cooksville, Fairview, Mississauga Valley, Applewood, Rathwood and Dixie all fell inside it, and its northern edge brushed the towers of the city centre.

Candidates

Albina Guarnieri (Liberal) — Born in 1953 in Faeto, in the Italian province of Foggia, Guarnieri took a master's degree in English at McGill and worked in political communications: spokesperson for federal minister Bob Kaplan, press liaison to Ontario Liberal leader Stuart Smith, and an assistant to Toronto mayor Art Eggleton in 1981. She was first elected in Mississauga East in November 1988 and had represented the area ever since. She chaired the Commons committees on human resources development and on government operations, co-chaired official languages, and served as parliamentary secretary to the minister of Canadian heritage. Paul Martin appointed her associate minister of national defence in December 2003 and minister of veterans affairs in July 2004, a post she held until the government fell in February 2006. She was seeking a seventh term.

Melissa Bhagat (Conservative) — A journalist living in Mississauga, Bhagat was making her first bid for public office.

Satish Balasunderam (NDP) — A lawyer practising in Mississauga, Balasunderam studied political science at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus before law school at Windsor and the University of Detroit Mercy.

Jaymini Bhikha (Green Party) — Bhikha worked as a project coordinator in the non-profit sector and lived in the riding.

Pierre Chénier, a printer, stood for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Cooksville is the oldest continuously settled part of this territory. Daniel Harris arrived in 1808 and the hamlet was briefly called Harrisville; Jacob Cook followed in 1819, held the contract to carry mail between York and Niagara by 1820, took out a tavern licence in 1829 and built an inn. The place took his name in 1836. Its position at the crossing of Dundas Street and Hurontario Street — the old Centre Road — made it the commercial hub of Toronto Township long before Mississauga existed.

That crossroads still organizes the riding. Hurontario carries the north-south traffic and Dundas the east-west, and the Cooksville stop on GO's Milton corridor offered weekday peak service only, in the commuting direction. Around them sit low-rise housing from the 1950s and 1960s, rental apartment slabs, and condominium towers stepping north toward the civic centre, giving the seat a density of roughly 3,500 people per square kilometre — among the highest in Peel.

The population is strikingly varied. Polish and Portuguese speakers make up two of the largest first-language groups, a legacy of postwar settlement around Cooksville, alongside substantial South Asian, Chinese, Caribbean, Filipino and Arabic-speaking populations, and the storefronts along Dundas East advertise accordingly. A large share of residents rented or had arrived recently, which pushed immigration casework, settlement services and rental costs to the front of the constituency workload.

Small business, retail, health care and professional work carried the local job market, and many residents travelled out each day to Toronto or to Mississauga's own office parks. Heading into October 2008 the practical arguments were about transit on the Hurontario corridor, the pace of condominium intensification near the city centre, and — once the financial crisis broke mid-campaign — household debt and job security. Guarnieri had represented this ground without interruption for twenty years.