Oak Ridges—Markham, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Oak Ridges—Markham

Few federal ridings in Canada carried as many people as this one. At the 2006 census it counted 169,645 residents, behind only Brampton West, and it had more registered electors than any other district in the country. Drawn across four York Region municipalities, it covered all of Whitchurch-Stouffville, the part of King Township below Highway 9, the top end of Richmond Hill including the community of Oak Ridges that gave the riding half its name, and the northern and eastern edges of Markham.

Candidates

Paul Calandra (Conservative) — Calandra was born in Markham in 1970 and read history at Carleton University, with political science as his minor. He spent 1995 to 2003 in the insurance business, then went to work as chief of staff to Steve Gilchrist, the Progressive Conservative member of the Ontario legislature for Scarborough East. His one earlier run at federal office had come in 2000, as the Canadian Alliance candidate in Scarborough East. He and his family lived in Stouffville.

Lui Temelkovski (Liberal) — Temelkovski was the sitting member, having won the seat when it was created in 2004 and held it in 2006. Born in 1954 in Brajčino, in what is now North Macedonia, he came to Canada with his family in 1968, took a Bachelor of Arts at McMaster University and spent his career in financial services, rising to sales manager with Freedom 55 Financial. He and his wife Loretta raised four children in Markham. In Parliament he sat on the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration and served as vice-chair of the international trade committee, and in opposition he was the Liberal critic for public works and government services.

Andy Arifin (NDP) — Arifin was a student living in Markham.

Richard Taylor (Green Party) — Taylor was a management consultant from Richmond Hill.

About the Riding

The census numbers describe a place remade by immigration. Roughly 41.6% of residents — about 70,000 people — were immigrants, and for 72,440 residents neither English nor French was a mother tongue. The labour force participation rate stood at 71.3% and unemployment at 5%, below the national figure of 6.3%, marking this out as a prosperous and heavily working suburb.

That composition made federal immigration policy unusually salient. Changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act carried in the spring 2008 budget legislation gave the minister power to issue instructions prioritising some applications over others, an attempt to attack a backlog that had grown to hundreds of thousands of files. In a riding where a large share of households were waiting on a relative's application, that was a doorstep issue rather than a technical one.

Land use was the other durable local argument. The Oak Ridges Moraine runs across the riding, a glacial ridge that recharges the groundwater feeding much of the Greater Toronto Area's river system, and development on and around it had been contested for years. King Township's horse farms and the older village cores at Stouffville, Nobleton and Schomberg sit uneasily beside the subdivisions climbing toward them.

Getting anywhere is the third question. The riding's Markham portion is residential rather than industrial — the old village core along Main Street, the Cornell district east of it, Cathedraltown and Berczy Village — with most of the region's office and technology employment lying further south, outside the boundary. Transit was thin: GO Transit's Stouffville rail line, with stations at Markham, Mount Joy and Stouffville, and a handful of bus routes served a population overwhelmingly dependent on cars. Federal infrastructure money, settlement service funding and the pace of suburban growth were the questions candidates were asked about most.