Wellington—Halton Hills, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Wellington—Halton Hills

Wellington—Halton Hills straddled two very different worlds. Its southern end, the Town of Halton Hills with Georgetown and Acton, was commuter country inside the Greater Toronto Area's orbit. North and west of that lay Wellington County: the Town of Erin, the townships of Guelph/Eramosa and Puslinch, and Centre Wellington with the river towns of Fergus and Elora. The Niagara Escarpment and the Grand River watershed ran through it, and much of the land was under provincial Greenbelt protection.

Candidates

Michael Chong (Conservative) — Chong had held the riding since it was created for the 2004 election. Born in Windsor in 1971 and raised near Fergus, he attended Centre Wellington District High School and Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He spent the 1990s in information technology, working at Barclays Bank and Research Capital, consulting for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority during the Pearson redevelopment, and serving as chief information officer of the National Hockey League Players' Association immediately before entering Parliament. He was a founding member of the Dominion Institute, which promoted Canadian history and civics education, and first ran in 2000 as a Progressive Conservative in Waterloo—Wellington. He joined cabinet in February 2006 as president of the Queen's Privy Council, minister of intergovernmental affairs and minister of sport, and resigned that November rather than vote for the motion recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada. From the backbench he had become one of the Commons' more persistent voices on parliamentary reform.

Bruce Bowser (Liberal) — Bowser lived in Georgetown and was president and chief executive of AMJ Campbell Van Lines, one of the country's larger moving companies, having led the management group that took its parent company private. He began his working life in banking in Halifax and sat on the board of the Georgetown Hospital Foundation.

Brent Bouteiller (Green Party) — A civil engineer based in Fergus, Bouteiller carried the Green nomination.

Noel Duignan (NDP) — Born in Dublin in 1948, Duignan worked as an executive assistant to New Democrat MPs Derek Blackburn and Lyle Kristiansen before winning Halton North in the 1990 Ontario election. He served as a parliamentary assistant to the minister of consumer and commercial relations from 1993 to 1995 and in 1994 sponsored a private member's bill banning landfills on the Niagara Escarpment. He lost his seat in 1995 and had contested this federal riding once before, in 2004.

Jeffrey Streutker, an information technology specialist from Georgetown, ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Georgetown was the largest community and the most suburban, with GO train service to Union Station and steady in-migration from Mississauga and Brampton. Acton, further west on Highway 7, had grown up around leather tanning and remained a smaller working town. Both belonged to Halton Hills, where manufacturers in plastics, tooling and food processing still supplied a substantial share of local employment even as more residents commuted out each morning.

Centre Wellington anchored the north. Fergus was founded by Scottish settlers and held its Highland Games each August; Elora sat where the Irvine River joins the Grand, above a limestone gorge that made it a tourist destination. Groves Memorial Community Hospital in Fergus served a wide rural catchment, and foundry, forging and cable manufacturing supplied industrial jobs.

Between the towns, the riding was farm country. Wellington County ranked among Ontario's leading agricultural jurisdictions for livestock, dairy and cash crops, and farm income, input costs and federal risk-management programs mattered here in a way they did not further south. Aggregate extraction was another persistent dispute, particularly in Puslinch around Aberfoyle, where gravel pits supplied the western GTA and drew regular objections from neighbours.

Growth management tied the two halves together. Greenbelt and escarpment rules limited where houses could go, water supply constrained Erin and the smaller settlements, and residents argued over how much countryside should be given over to subdivisions serving Toronto commuters.