Scarborough Southwest, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Scarborough Southwest

For the first time in twenty years the seat was open. Tom Wappel, a Liberal first elected in the area in 1988, was not running again, and every party went into the campaign without an incumbent's record to defend or attack. The riding ran from the Lake Ontario shoreline north to Eglinton Avenue East, between Victoria Park Avenue and Markham Road, and covered Birch Cliff, Cliffside and Cliffcrest on the bluffs, Clairlea, Oakridge and Kennedy Park inland, and pieces of Scarborough Village and the Golden Mile.

Candidates

Michelle Simson (Liberal) — Simson was appointed the Liberal candidate by leader Stéphane Dion rather than selected at a contested local nomination, under the party's effort to raise the number of women on its slate. She had been vice-president and general manager of a Scarborough leasing firm and had served as president of the Ontario Women's Liberal Commission.

Greg Crompton (Conservative) — Crompton worked as a business manager in Toronto and carried the Conservative banner in a riding that had returned Liberals since the 1980s.

Alamgir Hussain (NDP) — Hussain worked as an editor. He was president of the Dhaka University Alumni Association of Canada, a past president of the Bangladesh Association of Canada, and a founding member of the Danforth Village business improvement area.

Stefan Dixon (Green) — Dixon was a school vice-principal living in Scarborough.

M. H. Fatique Chowdhury Kabir, who ran a taxi business, stood as an independent.

About the Riding

Two quite different Scarboroughs sat inside one set of boundaries. Along the lake, Birch Cliff, Cliffside and Cliffcrest were settled neighbourhoods of older single-family houses on tree-lined streets above the bluffs, with small independent shops and something of a village feel. Inland, Kennedy Park and Oakridge held dense clusters of rental apartment towers and townhouse complexes with markedly lower household incomes; Eglinton East-Kennedy Park was one of the thirteen priority neighbourhoods the City designated in 2005. Few Toronto ridings packed that much contrast into so little ground.

Kingston Road ran diagonally across the district as its commercial spine, lined with strip plazas, restaurants and a surviving motel strip whose redevelopment was a standing municipal question. At the western edge, Danforth Avenue around Victoria Park had become the centre of Toronto's Bangladeshi community, with grocers, sweet shops, newspapers and community organisations concentrated in a few blocks; the commercial core sat just beyond the riding line, while Oakridge and Clairlea, inside it, were long-standing arrival neighbourhoods where a large majority of residents had been born abroad. Birchmount Stadium, on Birchmount Road south of Danforth Avenue, was the area's main outdoor sports facility.

Transit set the shape of the commute. The Bloor-Danforth subway ended at Kennedy station on the riding's northern boundary, and everyone living south of Eglinton reached it by bus, which made trips to downtown jobs long and unreliable.

Manufacturing employment along the Golden Mile had been shrinking for years, and the autumn of 2008 sharpened the point. Ontario had shed close to one manufacturing job in five since 2004, and in a riding of hourly workers with long commutes that arithmetic was personal rather than statistical — employment insurance eligibility, plant closures across southern Ontario, the cost of housing and the recognition of credentials earned abroad were the recurring subjects at the door.