Oakville, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Oakville

Three days into the campaign, Ford told the workforce at its Oakville assembly complex that a shift would go. The announcement of 10 September 2008 cut about 500 positions by eliminating the third shift in the body and paint shops; the company said it would offer retirement packages before resorting to layoffs. It landed in a riding where the plant is the largest industrial employer. Oakville sits on the Lake Ontario shore in Halton Region between Burlington and Mississauga, and the federal riding covers the southern part of the town — everything below Dundas Street in the east and below Upper Middle Road in the west — while north Oakville falls into the neighbouring Halton riding.

Candidates

Terence Young (Conservative) — Young was born in Toronto in 1952 and took a degree in political and social science at York University in 1975. He worked in sales for Ford and General Motors, booked Canadian musicians with Music Shoppe International, and later managed at Bell Canada. He sat in the Ontario legislature as the Progressive Conservative member for Halton Centre from 1995 to 1999, serving as parliamentary assistant to the education minister and later to the finance minister. After his fifteen-year-old daughter Vanessa died in 2000 following her use of the prescription drug cisapride, he set up Drug Safety Canada and pressed persistently in public for tougher federal oversight of pharmaceuticals.

M.A. Bonnie Brown (Liberal) — Brown had represented Oakville continuously since 1993, winning five consecutive elections after finishing second in her first attempt, in Oakville—Milton in 1988. She trained as a social worker and taught before entering public life, became a school trustee in 1987, and served on Oakville town council and Halton Regional Council. In Ottawa she chaired the Commons Standing Committee on Health and the Liberal caucus committee on social policy, and she was known for pressing against the patenting of human genes and for Canadian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

Blake Poland (Green Party) — Poland taught public health at the University of Toronto and lived in Oakville.

Michelle Bilek (NDP) — Bilek was an Oakville teacher.

About the Riding

Oakville had about 165,600 residents at the 2006 census and ranks among the wealthiest municipalities in Ontario, with an unusually high share of residents holding university degrees and average household earnings far above the provincial figure. Much of the town commutes — the Queen Elizabeth Way and the GO Transit Lakeshore West line both run through the riding — but Oakville is not only a bedroom community. Ford Motor Company of Canada keeps its head office here alongside the assembly plant, which at the time built the Ford Edge, Ford Flex and Lincoln MKX. Sheridan College's main Trafalgar Road campus, the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital and a large professional and financial services sector round out the employment base.

The automotive picture was the dominant local concern. North American vehicle sales had been sliding all year, gasoline prices had spiked in the summer, and the credit markets froze during the campaign itself. What Ottawa should do for an auto sector shedding jobs across southern Ontario was argued over in Oakville with a specificity that abstract national debates lacked.

The town's older character survives in the lakefront neighbourhoods around Old Oakville and Bronte Harbour, both built on the nineteenth-century shipping and shipbuilding trade, and in Sixteen Mile Creek's ravine system. Glen Abbey Golf Club, long the regular home of the Canadian Open, lies within the riding. Shoreline water quality and harbour management are standing local issues that reach into federal jurisdiction.