Mississauga—Erindale, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Mississauga—Erindale

Drawn around the Credit River valley and the master-planned district of Erin Mills, Mississauga—Erindale ran from the city's western limit east to Mavis Road. Its northern edge followed Britannia Road West, then Erin Mills Parkway, then Eglinton Avenue West; the southern edge ran along Dundas Street West, the Credit River and the Queensway West. At roughly 47 square kilometres it held one of the largest electorates in the country, taking in Erin Mills, Central Erin Mills, Churchill Meadows, Erindale and Creditview.

Candidates

Bob Dechert (Conservative) — Born in Brampton in 1958, Dechert studied economics at McMaster University, took his law degree at the University of Toronto and was called to the Ontario bar in 1985. He built a corporate practice at Gowling Lafleur Henderson and rose to senior partner. His political involvement stretched back to his teens; after the Progressive Conservative collapse of 1993 he helped form the Blue Committee, which built ties with the Reform Party and pressed for the merger that produced the Conservative Party. This was his third consecutive campaign in the riding, having lost to Carolyn Parrish in 2004 and to Omar Alghabra in 2006.

Omar Alghabra (Liberal) — Born in 1969 in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian family, Alghabra came to Toronto at nineteen, completed grade 13 for an Ontario diploma and earned a Bachelor of Engineering at Ryerson followed by an MBA at York. He worked at Ainsworth Inc. as a quality assurance and predictive maintenance supervisor, then joined General Electric, where he trained as a Six Sigma Black Belt and became global business leader for the company's refurbished industrial parts division. He headed the Canadian Arab Federation through 2004 and 2005 and won the seat in 2006 after Parrish's departure from the Liberal ticket.

Mustafa Rizvi (NDP) — Rizvi worked as an insurance adjuster and lived in the riding.

Richard Pietro (Green Party) — A communications and events coordinator based in Etobicoke, Pietro had run for the Greens in neighbouring Mississauga East—Cooksville in 2006.

Dagmar Sullivan, a Mississauga assembler, ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Erin Mills is the reason this riding looks the way it does. E. P. Taylor's Don Mills Development Corporation began assembling farmland west of the Credit in the 1950s, and the name it chose nodded both to the old village of Erindale downstream and to the mills that once worked the river. Taylor sold the holding in 1968, and Cadillac Fairview built out more than 7,000 acres in phases from the 1970s onward — Erin Mills South, Erin Mills West, Erin Mills Centre and Erin Mills Ridge. Erin Mills Town Centre opened as the district's commercial anchor in 1989.

Construction was still going as the campaign began. Churchill Meadows, out against the western city limit, was filling in with new subdivisions through 2008, bringing young families and complaints about school capacity and bus service. Older Erindale, nearer the river, has a different texture: mature trees, the wooded slopes of the Credit valley, the parkland along the water and the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus on the west bank.

Most residents commute, either into Toronto or to the office and research parks along Highway 403 and the Mississauga stretch of the 401. The population is diverse, with large South Asian, Chinese, Arab, Polish and Filipino communities.

Politically the seat was among the most closely watched in Ontario. It had changed hands at each of the two previous general elections, and a straight rematch between Dechert and Alghabra drew heavy party attention and volunteers from across the region.