Scarborough—Agincourt, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Scarborough—Agincourt

Agincourt began as a crossroads hamlet around a railway stop, filled in with tract housing after the war, and then filled again with new arrivals. The riding occupied the northwest corner of Scarborough — Steeles Avenue East on the north, Highway 401 on the south, Victoria Park Avenue on the west, Midland Avenue on the east — and contained L'Amoreaux, Tam O'Shanter-Sullivan, Steeles, and the parts of Agincourt and Milliken lying west of Midland.

Candidates

Jim Karygiannis (Liberal) — Karygiannis had held the seat since its creation for the 1988 general election and was going for a seventh term, one of the longest continuous runs of any Toronto member. He arrived from Athens with his family in 1966 and trained as an industrial engineer at the University of Toronto before going into business. In April 2004 he moved the private member's motion by which the House recognised the Armenian genocide, and later that year Paul Martin appointed him parliamentary secretary to the transport minister. His local reputation rested on constituency service and on constant attendance at the events of the riding's many communities.

Benson Lau (Conservative) — Lau was a family physician practising in Scarborough and new to the ballot here.

Simon Dougherty (NDP) — An artist living in Scarborough, Dougherty took part in the riding's all-candidates meeting at Knox United Church on Midland Avenue, where he argued that the roughly $50 billion in scheduled corporate tax reductions should be redirected into community services and measures to hold down the cost of living.

Adrian Molder (Green) — Molder lived in Scarborough and carried the Green Party's ballot line.

About the Riding

Around two-thirds of the people here were immigrants, one of the highest shares in any federal riding in Canada. The largest single group traced to China, with Cantonese and Mandarin both common at home, and Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu speakers accounted for much of the remainder. Steeles-L'Amoreaux, in the riding's northwest, was among the thirteen neighbourhoods the City of Toronto singled out in 2005 as underserved.

Commerce followed. The stretch of Sheppard Avenue East running through the riding had become one of Toronto's suburban Chinese commercial districts, with plazas, banks, supermarkets and restaurants trading largely in Chinese, while the Agincourt Mall at Kennedy Road anchored the older retail. The housing stock was mostly bungalows and back-splits from the 1960s and 1970s on curving streets, with apartment slabs clustered along the arterials through L'Amoreaux. The Scarborough Hospital's Birchmount campus, on Birchmount Road north of Highway 401, was the riding's largest institutional employer.

Two federal questions ran beneath everything else. The first was immigration: the 2008 budget implementation legislation gave the immigration minister authority to set processing priorities, cap intake and decline applications outright, and in a riding where family sponsorship backlogs and foreign credential recognition were daily constituency work, that argument landed hard. The second was the economy — local reporting during the campaign found voters here watching the markets and their own job security more closely than anything else, in a district whose employment ran to retail, small business, services and long commutes to work elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area.

Transit was the standing grievance. Nothing rapid ran anywhere in the riding, and residents depended on heavily used bus routes along Sheppard and Finch. The Transit City plan announced in 2007 proposed a light rail line along Sheppard Avenue East, running directly through Agincourt's main commercial strip; as of October 2008 it existed only on paper.