Willowdale, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Willowdale

Willowdale occupied the middle of the former City of North York. Steeles Avenue closed it off at the top, Highway 401 and the West Branch of the Don River at the bottom, Bathurst Street on the west and Bayview Avenue on the east. Yonge Street ran up the centre. Within that rectangle sat Willowdale proper, Lansing and Newtonbrook, with the North York Centre district around Yonge and Sheppard acting as the civic core.

Candidates

Martha Hall Findlay (Liberal) — Hall Findlay had held the seat only since 17 March 2008, when she won one of four by-elections held across the country that day. The vacancy followed the retirement of Jim Peterson, who had represented Willowdale for the Liberals from 1980 apart from a single term out of the Commons. Stéphane Dion appointed her the candidate in 2007. She took a degree in international relations at the University of Toronto and a law degree at Osgoode Hall, practised corporate and commercial law at Baker McKenzie, worked as general counsel and a senior executive at Bell Mobility, and founded a consulting firm advising telecommunications and technology companies. She had run in Newmarket—Aurora in 2004 and entered the 2006 Liberal leadership race, throwing her support to Dion after the first ballot.

Jake Karns (Conservative) — Karns lived in Toronto and carried the Conservative nomination.

Susan Wallace (NDP) — Wallace worked as a trade union consultant in Toronto.

Lou Carcasole (Green Party) — Carcasole was a consultant living in the riding.

Bahman Roudgarnia (Progressive Canadian Party) — A school principal from Thornhill, Roudgarnia stood for the party formed by Progressive Conservatives who declined to join the 2003 merger.

Bernadette Michael, retired, ran as an independent.

About the Riding

Yonge Street through Willowdale had been rebuilt in a generation. What had been a low-rise commercial strip serving a postwar suburb was by 2008 a canyon of condominium towers running from Sheppard Avenue to Finch, with more under construction. The North York Civic Centre, Mel Lastman Square — named for the man who ran North York for a quarter century before becoming Toronto's first mayor after amalgamation — the Toronto Centre for the Arts and the Empress Walk complex gave the area a downtown of its own. Three stations on the Yonge subway served it, and the Sheppard line that opened in 2002 branched east from Sheppard-Yonge. Finch station at the north end was the transfer point for York Region and GO buses coming down from Markham, Richmond Hill and Vaughan, which made it one of the busiest transit interchanges outside the old city.

The riding's population was overwhelmingly foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Willowdale held among the largest Iranian and Korean communities of any Canadian constituency, along with a substantial Chinese population, and the commercial character of the streets reflected it: Korean restaurants, groceries and churches along Yonge north of Finch, Persian bakeries and bookshops nearby, and Chinese businesses through the Sheppard corridor. Earl Haig Secondary School, on Princess Avenue east of Yonge, drew students from well beyond the riding for its arts programme.

Work was mostly white-collar and mostly elsewhere. Residents commuted downtown on the Yonge subway or drove out to office parks along Highway 404 and Steeles Avenue, and the local economy leaned on professional services, real estate, retail and small business.

The federal issues raised in 2008 were shaped by that profile: immigration and citizenship processing times, recognition of foreign professional credentials, and family reunification rules. Locally, the pace of high-rise approval on Yonge Street, arterial traffic and the strain on schools, parks and community services from tens of thousands of new residents were constant themes.