Simcoe—Grey, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Simcoe—Grey

Few Ontario ridings carried as many economies at once. Simcoe—Grey ran from the Niagara Escarpment and the Georgian Bay shore — ski hills, resort condominiums and a beach that draws southern Ontario every July — down through grain and potato country to commuter towns within reach of the Greater Toronto Area. Seven of its eight municipalities lay in Simcoe County: Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, Clearview, Springwater, Essa, New Tecumseth and Adjala-Tosorontio. Only The Blue Mountains, containing Thornbury and Clarksburg, fell on the Grey County side of the line.

Candidates

Helena Guergis (Conservative) — Guergis was the sitting member, having narrowly unseated Liberal Paul Bonwick in 2004 and held the seat in 2006. Born in Barrie in 1969 and raised in Angus, where she still lived, she took a real estate program at Georgian College and ran a gift shop before moving into politics as constituency and executive assistant to Progressive Conservative MPP Joe Tascona and then as a policy adviser to Ontario minister Janet Ecker. She was her party's candidate in Trinity—Spadina at the 2003 provincial election. On 4 January 2007 she was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Trade and for Sport.

Andrea Matrosovs (Liberal) — Matrosovs was a teacher living in Collingwood, at the tourism-driven northern end of the riding.

Katy Austin (NDP) — Austin was a retired teacher in Elmvale with a physical and health education degree from the University of Windsor. She had worked on every federal and provincial New Democrat campaign since 1974, moving from canvassing to organising to running campaigns, sat on the riding association executive for a decade and was its president going into 2008. In the summer of 1996 she rode a bicycle alone from Victoria to Elmvale, about 4,500 kilometres in forty days, camping along the way. She had also been the party's candidate here in 2006.

Peter Ellis (Green) — Ellis was retired and lived in Beeton, at the southern end of the riding.

Peter Vander Zaag, a potato farmer from Alliston, ran for the Christian Heritage Party, and Caley McKibbin, of Everett, for the Libertarians.

About the Riding

The northern end had become a four-season resort economy. Blue Mountain Resort drew skiers and, increasingly, summer visitors, and the condominiums spreading around Collingwood and The Blue Mountains were built largely for buyers from Toronto. Wasaga Beach was among the fastest-growing municipalities in Ontario, its permanent population climbing with retirees while summer weekends brought many times that number. Both leaned hard on water and wastewater systems, roads and hospital capacity that small municipal tax bases could not easily carry.

Manufacturing told a harder story. Goodyear closed its Collingwood rubber hose plant in 2007, ending 165 jobs and effectively finishing the town's industrial era. At the riding's southern end, Honda of Canada Manufacturing in Alliston was the largest private employer, with two vehicle assembly plants and a new $154-million engine plant that opened on 25 September 2008, three weeks before the vote — rare good automotive news in a province that had shed close to one manufacturing job in five since 2004.

CFB Borden, near Angus, is one of the Canadian Forces' largest training establishments and gave the riding a substantial military and civilian defence workforce. With the Afghanistan mission and its 2011 end date under national debate, the war was not an abstraction here.

Between the resorts and the base lies farmland: potatoes around Alliston, cattle, grain and mixed operations through Clearview and Adjala-Tosorontio. Farm income, the availability of family doctors in small towns and rural broadband were the recurring rural concerns, and the Liberal carbon-tax proposal drew scepticism in a district where most working people drive a long way every day.