Scarborough—Rouge River, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Scarborough—Rouge River

At Toronto's northeast corner the city runs out into the Rouge valley, and this riding covered the last of the grid before it. Its northern and eastern limits were the city limits themselves; Midland Avenue north of Finch and Brimley Road south of it formed the western edge; and the southern boundary stepped down through Finch Avenue East, Sheppard Avenue East and Highway 401. Malvern, Milliken, Armadale, Morningside Heights and Agincourt North lay inside.

Candidates

Derek Lee (Liberal) — Lee had held the riding since it was created for the 1988 general election and was seeking a seventh consecutive term. Born in Nova Scotia in 1948 to an RCMP officer's family, he finished at Neil McNeil High School in Scarborough in 1966 and later practised law, working in between as a political assistant to MP Paul Cosgrove and to Ontario housing minister Alvin Curling. He was parliamentary secretary to the government House leader from 1999 to 2001. In 1999 the University of Toronto Press published his study of the power of parliamentary houses to send for persons, papers and records, a sourcebook on the law and precedent of parliamentary subpoena powers.

Jerry Bance (Conservative) — Bance ran an appliance repair business in Scarborough and worked as a service technician. This was his second run here after 2006, and he made the case that two decades of Liberal representation had not translated into visible improvement in the riding.

Ryan Sloan (NDP) — A retail worker living in Toronto, Sloan named the shortage of decent jobs, the extension of the Afghanistan mission, crime and the cost of student loans as the riding's pressing problems.

Attila Nagy (Green) — Nagy was a writer living in Toronto.

Alan Mercer, a software quality assurance analyst, stood for the Libertarian Party.

About the Riding

This was among the largest and fastest-growing electoral districts in the country: close to 131,000 residents at the 2006 census, up more than thirteen per cent in five years. It also had the highest concentration of visible minority residents of any federal riding in Canada, just under ninety per cent. South Asian and Chinese communities each accounted for roughly a third of the population, with a substantial Black community as well. Tamil was the mother tongue of more than thirteen per cent of residents, the largest such share of any riding in the country, and Hindus made up close to fourteen per cent.

That made foreign policy unusually close to home. Sri Lanka's government abandoned the ceasefire in January 2008 and the war in the north escalated through the year; Canada had listed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a terrorist entity in April 2006, and Ottawa's posture on the conflict, on visas and on family reunification was followed closely here.

Malvern, the riding's largest neighbourhood, was planned in the 1970s around townhouse complexes and apartment towers, and was one of the thirteen priority neighbourhoods the City designated in 2005. East of it, Morningside Heights was going up on some 750 acres between Finch and Steeles — the last large block of undeveloped land inside Toronto, under construction since 2002 and still unfinished when the campaign began.

The everyday complaints were consistent: no rapid transit anywhere in the riding, bus trips of well over an hour to reach downtown jobs, youth unemployment, and the difficulty of converting qualifications earned abroad into Canadian work. Transit City, announced in 2007, proposed light rail along Sheppard Avenue East with a branch north into Malvern, but none of it had been built.