Scarborough—Guildwood, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Scarborough—Guildwood

The land here ends by falling away. A wall of glacial sediment runs the length of the riding's lakeshore, and the neighbourhoods above and behind it were laid out at different times and for very different buyers. The district was bounded by Lake Ontario on the south, by Markham Road, Bellamy Road South, Lawrence Avenue East and McCowan Road on the west, by Highway 401 on the north and by Morningside Avenue on the east. Inside sat Guildwood, Scarborough Village east of Markham Road, West Hill west of Morningside, Morningside and Woburn.

Candidates

John McKay (Liberal) — McKay had sat in the Commons since 1997, first for Scarborough East and, after the 2003 redistribution, for this seat. Born in Toronto in 1948, he took his first degree at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus and his law degree at Queen's, practised real estate law and served as president of the Durham Bar Association. He was parliamentary secretary to the finance minister from 2003 to 2006 and was sworn to the Privy Council in December 2003. Two private member's bills of his had reached the statute book: an amendment to the Hazardous Products Act that produced regulations, in force from 2005, requiring cigarettes sold in Canada to be manufactured so they self-extinguish; and the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, which received royal assent in May 2008 and directs Canadian aid spending at poverty reduction.

Chuck Konkel (Conservative) — Konkel spent three decades in policing. He served as an inspector with the Royal Hong Kong Police in the mid-1970s before joining the Toronto Police Service, where he rose to staff sergeant and became a specialist in Asian and eastern European organised crime, and he published two crime novels. He argued during the campaign that what the riding most needed was a restored sense of neighbourhood.

Sania Khan (NDP) — Khan was twenty-three and self-employed. She ran on drawing the riding's communities together and proposed a standing monthly public forum at which residents could put problems directly to their member of Parliament.

Alonzo Bartley (Green) — A mechanical engineer living in Toronto, Bartley stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Crime dominated the local campaign. Through the last week of September the candidates were arguing about shootings, sentencing and policing, with McKay warning that Scarborough needed a serious conversation about what actually reduces crime rather than an auction of promises. Parliament had passed the Tackling Violent Crime Act that February, adding mandatory minimum sentences for firearms offences and reverse-onus bail conditions, and what should follow it was unsettled.

Two of the city's thirteen 2005 priority neighbourhoods, Kingston-Galloway and Scarborough Village, lay inside the boundaries, and most of the riding's rental stock stood in high-rise clusters along Kingston Road, Markham Road and Lawrence Avenue East. Guildwood was a different proposition altogether: a planned community laid out from the late 1950s with large lots, curving streets and stone gateposts. The Guild Inn at its southern end, once an artists' colony and later a hotel, had been closed since 2001, and what to do with the buildings and the parkland around them was a running municipal argument. Bluffer's Park, at the foot of the cliffs, gave eastern Toronto one of its few points of public access to the waterfront.

The population was heavily South Asian, Black and Chinese, with a large share of newcomers. Employment was scattered across health care, retail and commutes to jobs downtown or in Durham Region, which put transit access and the cost of housing alongside crime in what candidates were asked about at the door.