Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Parry Sound—Muskoka

Highways 400 and 11 carry most of the traffic into Parry Sound—Muskoka, a sprawling riding made up of the District Municipality of Muskoka and nearly all of the Territorial District of Parry Sound. It runs from the Severn River in the southwest to Lake Nipissing in the northeast. On one side is the rocky Georgian Bay coast and the 30,000 Islands; on the other, the lake country around Huntsville, Bracebridge and Gravenhurst; and in between a great deal of Canadian Shield, unorganised territory, First Nations reserves and forest.

Candidates

Tony Clement (Conservative) — Clement was Minister of Health and minister responsible for FedNor, and had held the riding since 2006, when the outcome was settled only by a judicial recount. He holds a bachelor of arts and a law degree from the University of Toronto and entered politics as MPP for Brampton South in 1995, holding the transportation, environment, municipal affairs and housing, and health portfolios under Mike Harris and Ernie Eves. As Ontario's health minister he led the province's response to the 2003 SARS outbreak and pressed the World Health Organization in Geneva to lift its travel advisory against Toronto. He lost his provincial seat later that year and ran for the federal Conservative leadership in 2004. Through August and September 2008 his department was at the centre of the federal response to a listeriosis outbreak traced to a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. In June the Prime Minister had announced that Canada would host the 2010 G8 summit at Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, inside the riding.

Jamie McGarvey (Liberal) — A fourth-generation Parry Sound resident, McGarvey worked at Parry Sound Home Hardware and sat on the town council. His local files included the campaign to bring natural gas service to the Parry Sound area and the creation of a community business development corporation for the district.

Jo-Anne Boulding (NDP) — Boulding, a lawyer living in Bracebridge, had been in the riding seventeen years and came from a family of CCF and NDP members. The 2008 campaign was her third federal run and she had also stood provincially. She described the riding as unusually hard to canvass — enormous, thinly settled, and dotted with communities that had neither high-speed internet nor cell service — so her campaign ran on mail, phone calls, door-knocking and all-candidates meetings.

Glen Hodgson (Green) — Hodgson taught school and was a repeat candidate for the party, having carried the Green banner in the riding at the 2003 Ontario general election.

David Rowland ran as an independent.

About the Riding

Muskoka's lakes and the Georgian Bay shoreline make this one of Ontario's best-known cottage regions, and tourism is the economic backbone: resorts, marinas, outfitters, restaurants, construction trades and property services that swell with the summer population and thin out after Labour Day. Deerhurst Resort near Huntsville is the flagship property, and Algonquin Provincial Park lies against the riding's eastern boundary.

Outside the season, the permanent economy rests on forestry, small-scale manufacturing, construction, retail, health care and municipal services. Ontario's forest sector had been in a prolonged slump, and the hospitals at Huntsville and Bracebridge were among the larger year-round employers. Huntsville is the largest town; Bracebridge, Gravenhurst and Parry Sound each anchor their own service areas.

The population is older than the provincial average, a product of retirement migration to the lakes and the departure of younger residents for work in bigger centres. That shapes the federal agenda: health care access and physician recruitment in small towns, seasonal work and eligibility for employment insurance, and the cost of driving and heating where distances are long and the summer of 2008 had brought record fuel prices. A Canadian dollar trading near parity with the American dollar through the summer had also discouraged cross-border visitors and squeezed tourism operators. Set against that, the promise of the 2010 G8 summit at Huntsville had drawn an unusual amount of federal attention to the district.