Niagara Falls, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Niagara Falls

Three municipalities strung along the Niagara River make up this riding: the town of Fort Erie at the Lake Erie end, the city of Niagara Falls in the middle, and the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake where the river empties into Lake Ontario. All three belong to Niagara Region, and all three face western New York across the water. Four road crossings to the United States lie inside the riding — the Peace Bridge at Fort Erie, the Whirlpool Rapids and Rainbow bridges at Niagara Falls, and the Queenston–Lewiston Bridge at the northern end.

Candidates

Rob Nicholson (Conservative) — Nicholson went into the campaign as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, an office he had held since January 2007 after eleven months as Government House Leader. Born in Niagara Falls in 1952, he took a Bachelor of Arts at Queen's University and a law degree at the University of Windsor before practising locally. He first sat in the Commons from 1984 to 1993, serving as parliamentary secretary to the Government House Leader and then to the Attorney General under Brian Mulroney, and joining Kim Campbell's 1993 cabinet as Minister for Science and minister responsible for small business. Defeated that year and again in 1997, he was elected to Niagara Regional Council in 1997 and re-elected in 2000 and 2003 before returning to Parliament in 2004.

Joyce Morocco (Liberal) — Morocco lived in Niagara Falls and worked as a director of marketing.

Eric Gillespie (NDP) — Gillespie was a lawyer and stood for the New Democrats.

Shawn Willick (Green Party) — A teacher living in Fort Erie, Willick ran for the Greens.

About the Riding

Nowhere else in Ontario is a local economy so tightly bound to visitors from another country. The Fallsview Casino Resort, opened in 2004 at a cost of roughly a billion dollars, and the older Casino Niagara anchor a tourism district of hotels, restaurants and attractions that employs thousands of residents, while Niagara-on-the-Lake draws a different crowd to the Shaw Festival and to the wineries of the peninsula. That trade had been under strain for several years by 2008. The Canadian dollar climbed to parity with the American dollar in 2007, new United States documentation requirements were tightening up spur-of-the-moment border trips, and the financial panic that broke in the middle of the campaign put discretionary travel in doubt for the season ahead.

Fort Erie, at the southern end, carries a separate set of worries. The Fort Erie Race Track and its attached slots operation are among the town's larger employers, and the track's finances had become precarious enough that its owner agreed in February 2008 to underwrite purses for the racing season out of its own pocket. The Peace Bridge shapes much of the rest of Fort Erie's economy, and crossing wait times, customs staffing and border infrastructure are perennial federal files there.

Agriculture rounds out the picture at the northern end. In January 2008 CanGro Foods announced it would sell or shut its cannery in St. Davids, in Niagara-on-the-Lake; no buyer was found and the plant closed on 27 June, taking about 150 jobs with it. It was the last fruit cannery in Canada east of British Columbia. Roughly 150 peach and pear growers were left without a market, and an estimated 900 hectares of orchard were expected to come out as a result. The closure ran through the campaign as a live argument about what federal policy could or could not do for tender fruit growers.