Toronto—Danforth, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Toronto—Danforth

East of the Don River and west of Coxwell Avenue, Toronto—Danforth reached from the harbour and the Port Lands north to the Taylor Creek ravine. Danforth Avenue formed its spine. The seat gathered up Riverdale, Leslieville, the Gerrard India Bazaar, Chinatown East around Broadview and Gerrard, and a slice of the former borough of East York, all of it compact, walkable and tied together by the Bloor-Danforth subway.

Candidates

Jack Layton (NDP) — Layton had led the New Democrats since January 2003 and held this seat since 2004, when he unseated long-serving Liberal MP Dennis Mills in his first run for federal office. He grew up in Hudson, Quebec, completed a doctorate in political science at York University and taught at Ryerson before spending two decades on Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto council, where he worked on housing and environmental files and served a term as president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. October 2008 was his second general election as leader, and he campaigned on the argument that New Democrats rather than Stéphane Dion's Liberals were the alternative to Stephen Harper.

Andrew Lang (Liberal) — Lang won the Liberal nomination in April 2008 at a parish hall meeting on Curzon Street, his first time as a candidate after working on eighteen election campaigns. A University of Toronto graduate, he had run the Toronto Centre constituency office of Bill Graham, the former foreign affairs and defence minister, spent a period in Dalton McGuinty's office, and was working for the Ontario Chiropractic Association during the campaign. His father, Otto Lang, sat in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet as a Saskatchewan MP.

Sharon Howarth (Green Party) — A community organizer living in the riding, Howarth was the first candidate registered in Toronto—Danforth for the 2008 contest, in the field well before the writ was issued.

Christina Perreault (Conservative) — Perreault worked as a coordinator in government relations. She studied political science at McGill University, where she helped found and led a campus chapter of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, and she had run the candidate canvass for Peter Kent's campaign in St. Paul's in 2005 and 2006.

Marie Crawford stood for the Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada. Lawyer John Richardson ran as an independent, Marcell Rodden for the Marxist-Leninist Party and Bahman Yazdanfar for the Canadian Action Party.

About the Riding

Few Canadian ridings packed as many people into as little space. Housing ran from Victorian semis in Riverdale and worker cottages in Leslieville to postwar apartment slabs near Danforth and Woodbine. More Torontonians of Greek background lived here than anywhere else in the city, and the strip between Broadview and Coxwell traded on it: the sidewalks closed to traffic each August for Taste of the Danforth. Toronto East General Hospital on Coxwell Avenue was the largest single workplace inside the boundaries, with the rest of local employment spread across schools, small offices and a thick layer of independent retail.

The southern half of the riding was changing fastest. Foundries, tanneries and warehouses along Eastern Avenue and Carlaw had been converted into lofts, design studios and film production space, and Leslieville property values had climbed sharply since 2000. Further south lay the Port Lands, still largely industrial. The Portlands Energy Centre, a gas-fired station built beside the retired Hearn plant over sustained neighbourhood objection, began feeding the grid in June 2008 to cover summer peak demand, and the longer argument over waterfront redevelopment ran through the campaign.

Federal questions that registered here in 2008 were mostly urban ones. The Conservative government's roughly $45 million in cuts to arts and culture programs, announced in August, hit a constituency thick with performers, musicians and small production companies. Transit funding, affordable housing and immigrant settlement services along Gerrard and Broadview all featured, until the collapse of credit markets in the campaign's final weeks pushed the economy ahead of everything else.