Ottawa Centre, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Ottawa Centre

Ottawa Centre holds the ground the federal government physically occupies. It reaches from the Ottawa River south to Mooney's Bay, gathering in Centretown, the Glebe, Old Ottawa East and Old Ottawa South, then running west along Wellington Street through Mechanicsville, Hintonburg and Westboro before dropping south through Carlington and Carleton Heights. The Rideau Canal and the Rideau River close the eastern side. Parliament Hill, LeBreton Flats, the Supreme Court of Canada and Carleton University all fall inside the boundaries; the University of Ottawa sits just across the canal in Ottawa—Vanier.

Candidates

Paul Dewar (NDP) — Dewar entered the Commons in January 2006, taking over from Ed Broadbent, who had announced in May 2005 that he would not seek another term so he could care for his wife Lucille. Dewar came to the nomination from a classroom: he taught at D. Roy Kennedy and Hopewell Avenue public schools and held office in the Ottawa-Carleton Elementary Teachers' Federation. He studied at Carleton University and took a bachelor of education at Queen's. His mother, Marion Dewar, was mayor from 1978 to 1985 and organised Project 4000, the city's resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees.

Penny Collenette (Liberal) — Collenette had spent three decades inside the Liberal Party without ever standing for office. She studied at Carleton University and took her law degree at the University of Ottawa, ran the volunteer operation for Jean Chrétien's losing 1984 leadership bid, directed his winning 1990 campaign, and served as the party's national director and director of legal services through the 1993 general election. Chrétien then made her director of appointments in the Prime Minister's Office, a post she held for four years. By 2008 she was teaching at the University of Ottawa's law faculty. She took the nomination in a contest with Scott Bradley, and is married to David Collenette, a former Liberal cabinet minister.

Brian McGarry (Conservative) — McGarry began in the funeral trade in 1962 under Charles Hulse and Keith Playfair and went on to run the Hulse, Playfair & McGarry chapels, serving as president of both the Ontario Funeral Service Association and the Funeral Service Association of Canada. He sat on the Ottawa Board of Education from 1985 to 1994, including a term in the chair, and then moved to Ottawa-Carleton regional council.

Jen Hunter (Green) — Hunter worked as a facilitator in Ottawa and ran a practice under the name The Learning Catalyst.

John Andrew Akpata, a writer, stood for the Radical Marijuana party, and Pierre Soublière for the Marxist-Leninists.

About the Riding

The federal government is the riding's employer of first resort. Department headquarters line Wellington and Slater streets, the Ottawa Hospital's Civic Campus anchors the west end, and the rental towers of Centretown house a young, well-schooled and heavily renting population. Bank, Elgin, Preston and Wellington West carry the shops and restaurants.

The riding also holds much of the capital's cultural plant, including the National Arts Centre and the Canadian War Museum, opened at LeBreton Flats in 2005. That made the roughly forty-five million dollars in arts and culture reductions announced in August 2008 — the Canadian Memory Fund, Canadian Culture Online, Trade Routes and PromArt among them — a live local argument in the weeks before the vote.

Transit was the other standing grievance. City council had killed the north-south light rail contract in December 2006, the two hundred million dollars the federal government had set aside never flowed, and the contractor sued. The empty ground at LeBreton Flats, the cost of housing in the core, and the security of public service pay cheques as markets fell through the autumn filled out the debate, while in Hintonburg and Westboro, where warehouses and used-car lots were giving way to condominiums, redevelopment had itself become a neighbourhood issue.