Pickering—Scarborough East, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Pickering—Scarborough East

Almost no other Ontario riding straddled a municipal line the way this one did. It bolted the southeastern corner of Toronto's former city of Scarborough onto the lakeshore half of Pickering in Durham Region. The Scarborough section ran from the waterfront north to Finch Avenue, bounded on the west by Highland Creek, Morningside Avenue and Meadowvale Road; the Pickering section stopped at Highway 401 and ran east to the Ajax town line. The 2006 census recorded 106,602 residents, essentially unchanged from 2001.

Candidates

Dan McTeague (Liberal) — McTeague had sat continuously since 1993, first for the old Ontario riding, then Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge, and from 2004 for this seat. Born in Winnipeg in 1962 and raised in Scarborough, he studied at the University of Toronto, worked as an assistant to Alvin Curling when Curling was Ontario's housing minister, and spent four years in public relations at Toyota Canada before his first win. In Ottawa he became the Commons' most persistent voice on retail gasoline pricing and concentration in the oil industry, and served under Paul Martin as parliamentary secretary with responsibility for Canadians abroad.

George Khouri (Conservative) — Khouri, forty-nine, was born in Lebanon and studied international relations and business. He ran a furniture company from Ajax that had recently pushed into export markets, and had served on local committees and community organisations. His campaign concentrated on sentencing, victims' rights, tax reduction and youth crime prevention.

Andrea Moffat (NDP) — Moffat, thirty-one, had run a diversity and equity consulting and training practice for four years and had contested the same district for the Ontario NDP in 2007. She campaigned on poverty, gun violence, a $10 minimum wage, tuition costs and access to family doctors.

Jason Becevello (Green Party) — Becevello was twenty-five and worked as an assistant underwriter at an insurance company. He moved to Scarborough from Calgary as a child and studied political science, music and philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he was involved with the environmental awareness committee and the women's centre. He made the party's carbon tax shift and opposition to a Pickering airport his central themes.

The Christian Heritage Party and the Canadian Action Party also ran candidates, Rick Chue and Chai Kalevar.

About the Riding

The two halves behaved differently. The Scarborough side was mature, densely built and heavily immigrant, with large South Asian, Black, Filipino and Chinese communities and an ageing postwar housing stock. The Pickering side mixed established lakeshore neighbourhoods with subdivisions from the region's growth years, and sent much of its workforce west along the 401 and the Lakeshore East GO line.

The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, run by Ontario Power Generation on the waterfront, was the single largest presence in the riding and among the biggest employers in Durham Region, with roughly 3,000 workers across its CANDU units. Refurbishment, waste storage and the plant's eventual retirement were permanent fixtures of local debate. Beyond the riding's northern edge, in north Pickering, Ottawa still held the farmland it expropriated in 1972 for a second Toronto airport — a project shelved in 1975 and never formally abandoned, and one that candidates here lined up against across party lines. On the western boundary the Rouge Valley ran down to the lake through Rouge Park, opened by the province in 1995 and the focus of conservation advocacy in Scarborough and Durham for decades before that.

Fuel prices had an unusual grip on the campaign. Crude oil peaked above US$145 a barrel in July 2008 before falling back through the autumn, and pump prices swung sharply in between. Immigration and settlement services, transit and road capacity in the 401 corridor, and the cost of post-secondary education rounded out the agenda.