Oxford, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Oxford

Oxford covers almost all of Oxford County, a block of southwestern Ontario farmland straddling Highway 401 roughly midway between London and Kitchener. Woodstock, the county seat, counted 35,480 residents at the 2006 census; Ingersoll sits a few minutes west along the 401 and Tillsonburg lies to the south, with the townships of Blandford-Blenheim, East Zorra-Tavistock, Norwich, South-West Oxford and Zorra making up the balance.

Candidates

Dave MacKenzie (Conservative) — MacKenzie was in his second term and had served since 2006 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety. He spent thirty years with the Woodstock police, from 1967 to 1997, moving from constable through detective and inspector to deputy chief and then chief from 1987, and afterwards managed Roetin Industries Canada. Born in London, Ontario, he had contested the riding in 1997 and 2000 before winning it in 2004.

Martha Dennis (Liberal) — Dennis, a general manager living at Burgessville, carried the Liberal banner in Oxford.

Diane Abbott (NDP) — Abbott, a lawyer based in Ingersoll, stood for the New Democratic Party.

Cathy Mott (Green) — Mott, an employment consultant from Woodstock, ran as the Green Party candidate.

Shaun MacDonald (CHP Canada) — MacDonald, a student living in Woodstock, was the Christian Heritage Party's candidate.

About the Riding

Two industries carry Oxford: dairy farming and vehicle assembly. The county leads Ontario in milk production and calls itself the dairy capital of Canada, with a cheese-making tradition dating to the arrival of the factory system near Norwich in 1864, and its townships also support cash crops, hogs and poultry. Supply management is therefore a first-order political question here, and the collapse of the World Trade Organization's Doha round talks in late July 2008 left the international rules governing dairy trade unsettled just as the campaign began.

The manufacturing half of the economy sits along the 401. CAMI Automotive at Ingersoll, a General Motors and Suzuki joint venture building the Chevrolet Equinox and Pontiac Torrent, was among the largest industrial employers in southwestern Ontario. At the other end of the corridor, Toyota was finishing a 1.1-billion-dollar assembly plant on the edge of Woodstock — the first RAV4 line built outside Japan — hiring toward a workforce of about 1,300 and scheduled to start production that December. During the campaign the plant was a promise rather than a payroll. Hino Motors had opened a truck assembly operation in Woodstock two years earlier, and the parts suppliers clustered between the two towns were watching an automotive market deteriorating week by week as credit markets seized up.

Tillsonburg brought a third file. On 1 August 2008 the federal agriculture minister announced a 286-million-dollar Tobacco Transition Program, paying Ontario quota holders to leave the crop for good on condition that the province scrap production controls. The tobacco belt around Tillsonburg and neighbouring Norfolk County had been shrinking for years, and how the buyout would be administered — and what growers would do afterwards — was still being worked out as voters went to the polls.

The rest of the local agenda was familiar rural fare: physician recruitment and hospital services in the smaller towns, road and bridge maintenance across the townships, and the question of what a manufacturing county does when the plants that pay its mortgages start cutting shifts.