Whitby—Oshawa, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Whitby—Oshawa

Whitby—Oshawa sat in the middle of Durham Region, east of Toronto along the Highway 401 corridor. It combined the whole Town of Whitby with the northwestern quarter of Oshawa, the Oshawa portion being everything beyond King Street West, Oshawa Creek, Rossland Road and Simcoe Street. South of the 401 were older neighbourhoods and the Whitby harbour; north of Taunton Road the riding thinned out into Brooklin, Ashburn and Myrtle, hamlets being swallowed by new subdivisions.

Candidates

Jim Flaherty (Conservative) — Flaherty had been minister of finance since February 2006 and was seeking a second term in a riding he took from Liberal Judi Longfield in January of that year. Born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1949, he went to Princeton on a hockey scholarship, graduated in 1970 and took his law degree at Osgoode Hall, then practised as a litigator for two decades with the firm he co-founded, Flaherty Dow Elliott. Elected to the Ontario legislature in 1995, he served Mike Harris as minister of labour, attorney general and then finance minister and deputy premier, and ran twice for the provincial party leadership. In Ottawa he cut the GST from 7% to 5%, removed the tax advantage enjoyed by income trusts in October 2006, and used his February 2008 budget to create the Tax-Free Savings Account. That budget was barely six months old when the September credit crisis broke over the campaign.

Brent Fullard (Liberal) — Named as the Liberal candidate in September 2008, Fullard spent more than twenty years in Canadian capital markets, including as executive managing director and head of equity capital markets at BMO Nesbitt Burns, and later at Catalyst Asset Management. He founded and led the Canadian Association of Income Trust Investors after the 2006 tax change and had spent two years campaigning against it. In August 2008 he publicly challenged Flaherty to debate whether income trusts actually caused tax leakage, offering $50,000 to a charity of the minister's choosing; Flaherty turned the invitation down.

David Purdy (NDP) — Purdy lived in Oshawa and worked as an OnStar advisor.

Doug Anderson (Green Party) — A retired newspaper publisher from Whitby, Anderson carried the Green nomination.

Yvonne Forbes, a mortgage consultant from Ajax, ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Whitby recorded 111,184 residents at the 2006 census after two decades of growth driven by families priced out of Toronto who could still reach downtown by GO train or the 401. The historic core along Dundas and Brock Streets kept a small-town main street, while new subdivisions filled in north toward Taunton Road and around Brooklin.

Everything in Durham Region ran downstream of the automotive industry, and the autumn of 2008 was a bad one for it. On 3 June, General Motors announced it would end production at its Oshawa truck plant, which built the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, putting as many as 2,600 jobs at risk. The Canadian Auto Workers had ratified a new three-year agreement barely two weeks earlier, on 16 May, and union leaders said they had been misled. Rising fuel prices had gutted demand for full-size pickups, and the supplier network across Whitby, Oshawa and Ajax felt it immediately. By October the wider credit freeze had put the survival of the Detroit manufacturers themselves in question.

Away from the auto file, the largest employers were institutional. The Whitby Mental Health Centre had operated on the lakeshore since 1913, and the Regional Municipality of Durham ran its headquarters and much of its administration out of Whitby. Commuting times, GO service east of Oshawa and the still-unbuilt eastward extension of Highway 407, promised again by the province in 2007, were standing local grievances that residents raised alongside the state of the car industry.