Welland, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Welland

Water made this riding. The Welland Canal cut north to south through the middle of it, carrying ocean-going ships between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and drawing heavy industry to its banks for the better part of two centuries. The constituency, created for the 2004 election, combined the cities of Welland, Port Colborne and Thorold with the town of Pelham, the rural township of Wainfleet on the Lake Erie shore, and a small corner of southern St. Catharines.

Candidates

Malcolm Allen (NDP) — Allen was born in Glasgow in 1953 and came to Canada in 1963 when his father, a shipwright, moved to the Collingwood shipyards and then to Port Weller Dry Docks on the canal. An electrician by trade, he sat on the executive board of CAW Local 199, as recording secretary from 1996 and financial secretary from 2000, and took a degree in history and political science at Brock University in 1983. He was elected to Pelham town council in 2003, served as deputy mayor in 2006, and drove the creation of Genesis Court, a non-profit affordable-housing project with support services that opened in Pelham in 2007. This was his first run for Parliament.

Alf Kiers (Conservative) — Kiers was self-employed and lived in Wainfleet, the agricultural township at the riding's southern end.

John Maloney (Liberal) — The sitting member, Maloney was seeking a sixth term. Born in Welland in 1945, he holds an arts degree and a criminology diploma from the University of Toronto and a law degree from Osgoode Hall. He moved into private practice in Port Colborne in 1974 and became a partner in Maloney and Maloney two years later. He was named Port Colborne's Citizen of the Year in 1980 and received a Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002. First elected in 1993 in Erie, he sat for Erie—Lincoln from 1997 and for Welland from 2004, and served as parliamentary secretary to the Attorney General from 1999 to 2001.

Jennifer Mooradian (Green Party) — Mooradian was a homemaker from St. Catharines, running at the riding's northern edge.

Jody Di Bartolomeo, a professor living in Port Colborne, ran as an independent, and factory worker Ron Walker stood for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

The riding counted 112,875 residents at the 2006 census, and its politics were shaped by the steady erosion of the industrial base that had built those communities. Steel, metal fabricating, textiles and machinery had employed generations along the canal, and each closure over the previous decade removed several hundred jobs at a stroke. The blow during this campaign landed on 2 September 2008, when Deere and Company called its Welland workforce into a meeting to announce the plant would shut by the end of 2009, ending roughly 800 jobs. Gator utility-vehicle assembly went to Horicon, Wisconsin, and cutting and loading attachments to Monterrey and Saltillo in Mexico. The company pointed to the Canadian dollar, which had reached parity with the U.S. dollar the previous autumn and stripped away the cost advantage of manufacturing in Ontario.

Port Colborne, at the canal's Lake Erie entrance, had been built around the nickel refinery that opened there in 1918, though its workforce was a fraction of its postwar peak. Thorold, at the northern locks, kept its paper mills. Welland itself had one of the larger French-speaking populations in southern Ontario, a legacy of Quebec families recruited to the mills, and supported a francophone school system and community organizations. Pelham, centred on Fonthill above the Niagara Escarpment, was the riding's most prosperous municipality and the base of a tender-fruit and nursery sector, while Wainfleet remained farmland and cottage shoreline.

Manufacturing job losses, employment insurance eligibility for laid-off workers and the future of the canal-side economy dominated the local campaign, alongside pressure on hospital services in an older-than-average population.