Ottawa South, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Ottawa South

Ottawa South sits east of the Rideau River, with Highway 417 curling around its northern and eastern sides and the Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport at its southern end. Alta Vista, Riverside Park, Billings Bridge, Heron Park, Ellwood, Hunt Club, South Keys, Greenboro and Blossom Park are the neighbourhoods inside it. Bank Street and the Airport Parkway are the main north-south spines.

Candidates

David McGuinty (Liberal) — McGuinty had held the seat since 2004 and was seeking a third term. A bilingual lawyer with a master of laws from the London School of Economics, he ran the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy as president and chief executive from 1995 to 2004, which put him at the centre of federal environmental policy work in the decade before a carbon tax became an election issue. Earlier he worked for UNICEF across West and Central Africa and practised corporate law in London. His brother Dalton was premier of Ontario, and their father, Dalton McGuinty Sr., had represented Ottawa South at Queen's Park.

Elie Salibi (Conservative) — Salibi worked in the Ottawa technology sector as director of international sales at Corel Corporation, the city's best-known software firm, and holds a bachelor of commerce from the University of Ottawa.

Hijal De Sarkar (NDP) — De Sarkar was a student when he carried the New Democratic banner in the riding.

Qais Ghanem (Green) — Ghanem practised as a neurologist in Ottawa for about two decades and taught as a clinical professor at the University of Ottawa's teaching hospitals. By 2008 he had left medicine and was producing and presenting a community radio programme on diversity.

Al Gullon, a professional engineer, stood for the Progressive Canadian Party. Jean-Serge Brisson ran for the Libertarians; he had opened his own radiator repair business in Embrun in 1974 and had led the federal party from 1999 until stepping down in May 2008.

About the Riding

Ottawa South is a middle-income suburb with one of the most varied populations in eastern Ontario. Arabic is widely spoken in the apartment districts around Heron Gate and Hunt Club, and the riding holds sizeable South Asian and East African communities alongside long-established anglophone and francophone families. Alta Vista, in the northeast, is a settled neighbourhood of single-family houses built mostly in the 1950s and 1960s; the land south of Hunt Club Road was still filling in with new construction through the 2000s.

The federal public service employs more residents than anything else, but the airport lies inside the riding and supports aviation, freight, hotel and hospitality work of its own. The Ottawa Hospital's Riverside Campus provides health care jobs, and the South Keys and Billings Bridge shopping centres serve as the commercial anchors for the south end.

Transit was the sharpest local file in 2008. The north-south light rail line that city council cancelled in December 2006 would have run through Greenboro and South Keys toward Riverside South, and the two hundred million dollars the federal government had committed to it did not flow once the contract was killed. Residents of the growing southern subdivisions were left with buses and the Airport Parkway, and no one had settled who would pay for a replacement plan.

Housing pressure in the Heron Gate towers, settlement services for newcomers, airport-area development and the argument over the Liberal carbon tax proposal — a debate McGuinty's environmental record put him in the middle of — rounded out the campaign, with the September collapse of financial markets sharpening worries about jobs and pensions.