Scarborough Centre, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Scarborough Centre

If Scarborough has a downtown, this is it. The Scarborough Civic Centre and the Town Centre mall both opened in 1973, built to give a sprawling post-war suburb a middle, and the office and apartment towers around them are the closest thing the district has to a skyline. The riding ran north from Eglinton Avenue East to Highway 401, and east from Victoria Park Avenue to McCowan Road, Lawrence Avenue East and Bellamy Road North, taking in Wexford, Maryvale, Dorset Park, Bendale, Ionview, Eglinton East and the Golden Mile.

Candidates

John Cannis (Liberal) — Cannis had represented Scarborough Centre since 1993 and was seeking a sixth term. Born in Kalymnos in 1951 and schooled in Toronto, he spent eighteen years in business — an international executive search firm of his own, plus consulting in computing and human resources — before entering the House. As parliamentary secretary for industry between 1999 and 2001 he carried four bills through the Commons, among them amendments to the Patent Act and the Canadian Space Agency Act, and he went on to chair the standing committee on national defence and veterans affairs.

Roxanne James (Conservative) — James was born in Scarborough in 1966 and worked as an information technology systems analyst and later in real estate. This was her second consecutive run at the seat, having also been the Conservative candidate in 2006, and she went into the campaign with an organisation that had already been through one general election.

Natalie Hundt (NDP) — Hundt was a community organiser living in Scarborough.

Ella Ng (Green) — Ng worked as an operational risk manager in information systems.

About the Riding

The Golden Mile, along Eglinton Avenue East at the riding's southern edge, was Ontario's showcase post-war industrial strip, laid out in the 1950s for factories that employed thousands of Scarborough residents. General Motors assembled vans at 1901 Eglinton Avenue East from 1974 until the last one came off the line in May 1993; most of that site became the Eglinton Town Centre, and the corridor as a whole had converted to big-box retail. Centennial College's Ashtonbee campus, the region's main centre for automotive and aircraft trades training, stood just north of the strip.

Housing graded from post-war bungalows in Wexford and Maryvale to concrete apartment towers around Dorset Park and the Town Centre. Dorset Park was one of the thirteen neighbourhoods the City designated as priority areas in 2005, and Eglinton East, along the southern boundary, formed half of another. Tower-block maintenance, tenant services and youth programming were steady constituency business.

The population was among the most varied in the country, with large South Asian, Filipino, Chinese and Caribbean communities and a high proportion of recent arrivals. Employment spread across retail, health care, warehousing and services rather than concentrating in any one employer, which made the manufacturing contraction of 2008 diffuse but real: in a riding of hourly workers with long commutes, a downturn shows up first as cancelled shifts and lost overtime, well before it appears in any statistic.

Transit shaped the day. The Scarborough RT, running since March 1985, connected the Town Centre to the Bloor-Danforth subway at Kennedy station, but its cars were aging and its capacity limited, and the argument over what should replace it was already under way.