Perth—Wellington, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Perth—Wellington

Perth—Wellington took in the whole of Perth County — Stratford, St. Marys, North Perth, Perth East, West Perth and Perth South — and reached northeast into Wellington County for the Town of Minto and the townships of Mapleton and Wellington North. Stratford, on the Avon River, was the urban anchor; St. Marys sat on the Thames at the southern corner, while Listowel, Palmerston, Harriston and Mount Forest marked the northern half. Some 3,600 square kilometres held 103,874 people at the 2006 census.

Candidates

Gary Ralph Schellenberger (Conservative) — Schellenberger went into the campaign holding the seat. Born at Sebringville in 1943, he spent more than four decades in the painting and decorating trade in Stratford and sat on the council of Downie Township, since folded into Perth South, from 1988 to 2000. He contested the predecessor riding of Perth—Middlesex unsuccessfully in 1997 and again in 2000, then won it in a 2003 by-election and carried the redrawn Perth—Wellington in 2004 and 2006.

Sandra Gardiner (Liberal) — Gardiner had worked as a registered nurse in Stratford for fourteen years, in hospital and community settings, and was a community case manager with the South West Community Care Access Centre. She was active in the local environmental group CARE Stratford and in FarmGate5, a network promoting local food.

Kerry McManus (NDP) — McManus was a teacher-librarian at Stratford Central Secondary School, on leave to complete a master's degree in education at York University. She was a co-founder of CARE Stratford.

John Cowling (Green Party) — Cowling worked in customer service for a Stratford industrial supply company and helped found ECOPerth, an umbrella body for the county's environmental groups. He had carried the Green banner in the riding in both 2004 and 2006.

Irma DeVries (Christian Heritage Party) — DeVries farmed at Harriston, in Minto at the riding's northern end, and generated hydroelectricity on a small scale. This was her third consecutive campaign for the party here, after 2004 and 2006.

The Marxist-Leninist Party also fielded a candidate, Julian Ichim.

About the Riding

Few Canadian ridings depend so completely on farming. Perth County is among Ontario's most productive agricultural counties, with dairy leading and hog production close behind, and a cluster of food processors built around that output. The campaign fell in the middle of a brutal year for hog producers. Feed grain prices had surged, the Canadian dollar had climbed close to parity with the American, and hog prices had stayed low for months. Ottawa responded with a $50-million program paying producers for breeding swine sent to slaughter, an attempt to shrink the national herd; losses across Ontario's pig sector that year still ran past $250 million. Dairy farmers had their own worry, the future of supply management in trade talks, sharpened by the collapse of the World Trade Organization's Doha round that July.

Stratford, a city of about 30,000, supplied the riding's second economy. Its theatre season runs from spring into the autumn and brings several hundred thousand visits a year to a place that would otherwise read as a mid-sized manufacturing town. That manufacturing base — parts plants, fabricators and moulders — was already absorbing the effects of the strong dollar and softening American orders.

Listowel anchored the north with its own factories and processors, St. Marys was known for its limestone quarry and cement works, and Mitchell, Milverton and Atwood filled the country in between. The federal questions that carried weight here were farm income support, trade negotiations touching supply management, the cost of fuel and fertiliser after a sharp run-up in input prices, and what a slowing economy would mean for small-town industry.