Peterborough, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Peterborough

The riding wrapped the city of Peterborough in a ring of townships stretching from the north shore of Rice Lake and the Trent River up into the lower Kawarthas. Havelock, Norwood and Lakefield sat inside its boundaries, as did the Curve Lake and Hiawatha First Nations. The 2006 census counted 116,626 residents, a rise of a little over 5% since 2001 — brisk growth by the standards of central Ontario.

Candidates

Dean Del Mastro (Conservative) — Del Mastro was the sitting member, having taken the seat in 2006 and ended a run of four straight Liberal wins under Peter Adams. Born in Peterborough and a graduate of Adam Scott Collegiate, he studied business at the University of Windsor and worked in his family's automobile dealership before entering the Commons.

Betsy McGregor (Liberal) — McGregor came to the campaign from an unusual career. She holds a master's degree in geography and qualified as a veterinarian at the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph in 1987, then spent two years in Indonesia with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Most of her working life had been in federal public policy, at Industry Canada and Agriculture Canada on food safety and biotechnology questions, with fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Medical School. This was her first campaign for elected office.

Steve Sharpe (NDP) — Sharpe, a Peterborough teacher, carried the New Democratic banner. The party had a long memory in the city: Walter Pitman won a by-election here in 1960 for the New Party, a result that helped push the labour and CCF forces into founding the NDP the following year.

Emily Berrigan (Green Party) — Berrigan was twenty-one. She joined the Green Party while at high school in Port Hope and spent eight months working at the party's national office in Ottawa before returning to contest the riding.

The Marxist-Leninist Party also nominated a candidate, Elaine Couto.

About the Riding

Peterborough draws attention out of all proportion to its size because of how reliably it picks winners. Since 1957 it has sent a member of the governing party to Ottawa in every general election but two, and its demographic profile is close enough to the national average that consumer goods firms have long used the city to test products. Both major parties campaigned here as though the outcome mattered nationally.

The city's industrial history is written along the Otonabee River. General Electric's Peterborough works, opened in 1892, once employed thousands building motors, generators and transformers, and the Quaker Oats mill has run on the riverbank since 1902. By 2008 the manufacturing payroll was a shadow of that, and the wider contraction across southern Ontario — high dollar, high energy costs, weak American orders — framed the local campaign. The financial crisis that broke over the middle weeks of the writ period sharpened it.

What had grown instead was the institutional economy. Trent University, which opened to students in 1964 on riverside land given by Canadian General Electric, and Sir Sandford Fleming College rank among the region's largest employers alongside the Peterborough Regional Health Centre. Tourism supplies a seasonal third pillar: the Peterborough Lift Lock, still the highest hydraulic boat lift in the world since its opening in 1904, sits on the federally run Trent–Severn Waterway, whose ageing locks and dams were a standing claim on Parks Canada's budget. Cottage traffic fills the townships north of the city every summer.

Manufacturing losses, tuition costs in a city with two campuses, health care funding and the state of the waterway were the issues that registered locally.