Vaughan, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Vaughan

The Vaughan riding was defined by two lines. It held every part of the City of Vaughan lying west of Highway 400, plus everything north of Rutherford Road. That took in Woodbridge and Kleinburg, the upper half of Maple, and the farmland running north toward King Township, with Peel Region across the western boundary. It was one of the fastest-expanding pieces of the Greater Toronto Area, with subdivision construction pushing steadily north and west.

Candidates

Maurizio Bevilacqua (Liberal) — Heading into 2008 Bevilacqua was one of the longest-serving members of the Commons. He was first declared elected in York North in 1988 by a margin so narrow that the courts eventually annulled the result, and he took the seat again in the December 1990 by-election that followed. He represented Vaughan—King—Aurora from 1997 and the redrawn Vaughan riding from 2004. Born in Sulmona, Italy, in 1960, he came to Canada as a boy, attended Emery Collegiate and took a degree at York University. Under Jean Chrétien he served as secretary of state for science, research and development and then for international financial institutions, and he chaired the Commons finance committee for years. He entered the 2006 Liberal leadership race and withdrew that August.

Richard Lorello (Conservative) — Lorello was an information technology manager living in Vaughan.

Vicky Wilkin (NDP) — Wilkin was a student and carried the New Democratic banner.

Adrian Visentin (Green Party) — Visentin was self-employed and lived in Vaughan.

About the Riding

The City of Vaughan counted 238,866 residents at the 2006 census, up sharply from a decade earlier. Woodbridge was the riding's centre of gravity and the heart of the largest concentration of Italian Canadians in the country, with bakeries, banquet halls, social clubs and construction firms clustered along Highway 7 and Islington Avenue. Kleinburg, further north, kept the look of a nineteenth-century village and housed the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and its holdings of Group of Seven and Indigenous work.

Vaughan's economy ran on building. Land development, residential and commercial construction, the building trades, trucking and food processing dominated, with industrial parks lining Highway 7 and both sides of Highway 400. Canada's Wonderland, off Jane Street north of Rutherford Road, was the country's largest theme park and the area's biggest seasonal employer, and Vaughan Mills, opened nearby in 2004, had become a regional retail draw.

Two infrastructure files shaped local politics in 2008. Vaughan was the largest city in Canada without a hospital, and after years of lobbying the province had committed to build one; in October 2008 it directed the Central Local Health Integration Network to prepare a master plan for the project. Separately, the province had committed $670 million in 2006 and Ottawa $697 million in 2007 toward extending the Spadina subway line north from Downsview into Vaughan, and the contribution agreement letting money flow was signed in September 2008. The planned terminus near Highway 7 and Jane Street was meant to anchor a downtown for a city that had never had one.

Congestion on Highways 400 and 407 and on the arterial roads feeding them was a daily complaint, as was the pace at which farmland on the northern edge was converting to housing. Provincial Greenbelt and Oak Ridges Moraine rules constrained development in the riding's rural north, and how much further the city should grow was a live argument among residents who had mostly arrived in the previous twenty years.