Richmond Hill, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Richmond Hill

Carved in 2004 largely out of the former Oak Ridges riding, Richmond Hill covered the central band of the York Region town of the same name. Highway 7 formed its southern boundary and Gamble Road, Yonge Street and Elgin Mills Road East its northern, with Highway 404 to the east and Bathurst Street to the west. Growth was the defining fact: the 2006 census put the riding at 122,614 residents, up 12.1% in five years.

Candidates

Bryon Wilfert (Liberal) — Wilfert had represented the area since 1997, first in Oak Ridges and then in Richmond Hill from 2004. Born in Toronto in 1952, he taught history and political science at a Toronto private school for twenty years and holds bachelor's degrees in arts and education and a master's degree from the University of Toronto, along with a public administration credential from St. Lawrence College. He sat on Richmond Hill council from 1985 to 1997, led the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association in 1995–96 and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 1996–97. In government he was parliamentary secretary to the finance minister from 2002 and to the environment minister from 2004.

Chungsen Leung (Conservative) — Leung was born in Taipei in 1950, took his secondary education in Japan and immigrated to Canada in 1968. He holds a degree in economics and business from Carleton University and a master's in management and engineering from the University of Southern California. He built a career owning and running small and mid-sized companies based in Richmond Hill, chaired the audit committee of a Toronto-listed software and engineering firm, and founded the Richmond Hill and Markham Chinese Business Association. He had stood for the Progressive Conservatives in Willowdale in 2000.

Wess Dowsett (NDP) — Dowsett worked as a union staff representative in Richmond Hill.

Dylan Marando (Green Party) — Marando, a student, ran for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Richmond Hill was among the fastest-changing communities in the Greater Toronto Area and one of the most linguistically varied places in the country, with large Chinese and Persian-speaking populations. The Persian community was the town's fastest-growing group, clustered along the Yonge Street corridor, where the plazas around Yonge and 16th filled with Iranian bakeries, groceries and restaurants. Settlement services, recognition of foreign credentials and family reunification were not abstractions in a riding where a large share of households had arrived within living memory.

The local economy runs on small and medium-sized business, professional services and a commuting workforce. Retail and office development cluster along Yonge Street and the Highway 7 corridor at the southern edge, where Richmond Hill Centre was being planned as a regional transit hub. York Region's push to extend the Yonge subway north from Finch had just been named a first-priority project in Metrolinx's regional transportation plan, adopted weeks before the vote, and it was already looking to Ottawa for capital money. Federal infrastructure transfers were a recurring theme in a municipality straining against school capacity, road congestion and water servicing limits.

Green space and heritage disputes ran alongside the growth. The University of Toronto decided in October 2007 to sell the David Dunlap Observatory lands and completed the sale to a developer in June 2008, setting off the most contentious local controversy of the period as residents organised to preserve the property, its parkland and its telescope. Farther north, the protected lands of the Oak Ridges Moraine set a limit on how far the built-up area could spread.

Federal questions here were mostly economic and municipal: financial markets and household savings, immigration processing backlogs, infrastructure money for a fast-growing suburb, and the tax treatment of the small business owners who made up a large slice of the electorate.