Northumberland—Quinte West, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Northumberland—Quinte West

Rick Norlock and Paul Macklin had faced each other on a ballot twice before, in 2000 and again in 2006, and 2008 made it three. Their riding runs east along the Lake Ontario shoreline of southeastern Ontario, combining all of Northumberland County — Port Hope, Cobourg, Cramahe, Brighton, Alnwick/Haldimand and Trent Hills — with the western slice of Hastings County, principally the city of Quinte West and its component communities of Trenton, Frankford, Sidney and Murray. Alderville First Nation sits on Rice Lake's south shore.

Candidates

Rick Norlock (Conservative) — Norlock was the sitting member, elected in 2006 after more than three decades as an Ontario Provincial Police officer. Born in Chapleau in 1948 and living in Warkworth, he had run for the Canadian Alliance in Northumberland in 2000, finishing second to Macklin. He had led the Warkworth Community Service Club and sat on the Cobourg social housing board, the Ontario Film Review Board and the Quinte chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

Paul Macklin (Liberal) — Macklin was acclaimed for a rematch. Born in Northumberland County in 1944, he took a degree at the University of Western Ontario and a law degree at the University of Windsor, then practised with the Toronto firm Davies, Ward & Beck. He represented Northumberland from 2000 and the redrawn Northumberland—Quinte West from 2004, serving as parliamentary secretary to the justice minister under Jean Chrétien and again under Paul Martin, before losing to Norlock in 2006. He lived in Cobourg.

Russ Christianson (NDP) — Christianson was a consultant living at Campbellford who specialised in community economic development and had helped start more than two hundred co-operative businesses, in fields from food processing to renewable energy and forestry. The Ontario Co-operative Association gave him its Co-operative Spirit Award in 2003. He was founding president of the Campbellford/Seymour Community Foundation, endowed in 2001 with the proceeds of the sale of the town's century-old public utility.

Ralph Torrie (Green Party) — Torrie, of Cobourg, was an energy analyst who came to the field as a physics student at the University of Waterloo in the 1970s. He had been assistant coordinator of the Energy Research Group at the United Nations University and the International Development Research Centre, and the firm he founded in 1979 built software that municipalities used to plan greenhouse gas reductions.

About the Riding

The single largest presence here wears a uniform. 8 Wing Trenton is the Canadian Forces' main air transport hub and the biggest air force base in the country, and the arrival of four C-17 Globemaster III airlifters between August 2007 and April 2008, flown by 429 Squadron, had raised its profile further. Trenton is also where Canada's dead returned from Afghanistan, and in August 2007 the stretch of Highway 401 running west from the base toward Toronto was designated the Highway of Heroes. With the mission extended by parliamentary vote in March 2008, the war was not an abstraction in Quinte West.

Away from the base the economy is mixed. Northumberland farms produce dairy, beef and cash crops; Cobourg and Brighton run on lakefront tourism, heritage main streets and light manufacturing; Campbellford and Hastings sit on the Trent–Severn Waterway, a Parks Canada property whose locks draw summer boaters.

Port Hope carries an unusual federal file. Decades of radium and uranium refining at the former Eldorado works left low-level radioactive waste distributed through the town, and a cleanup agreement between Ottawa and the municipalities, the Port Hope Area Initiative, was meant to deal with it. Progress there, along with the manufacturing losses spreading through southern Ontario in 2008, framed much of the local economic argument.