Windsor—Tecumseh, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Windsor—Tecumseh

Windsor is Canada's southernmost city, and this riding held its eastern flank, looking out across the Detroit River toward the American shore. It took in the Town of Tecumseh on the Lake St. Clair shoreline together with the eastern and northern parts of the City of Windsor — everything lying beyond a line running down Langlois Avenue, east along Tecumseh Road East and south along Pillette Road. Riverside, Forest Glade and Fontainebleau made up most of the Windsor portion.

Candidates

Joe Comartin (NDP) — Comartin had represented the riding since 2000 and was seeking a fourth term. He was born in Stoney Point in 1947, took a political science degree from the University of Windsor in 1968 and a law degree there in 1971, and practised civil litigation and family law in Windsor and Belle River for close to thirty years. In 1984 he became a lawyer for the Canadian Auto Workers in Windsor and went on to manage its legal services plan, the largest private-sector legal plan for workers in the country. He served as the party's justice and public safety critic and as deputy House leader, and a 2007 Maclean's survey of parliamentarians named him the most knowledgeable MP in the Commons.

Denise Ghanam (Conservative) — Ghanam ran a strategic management consulting practice specialising in labour market development. She holds an honours commerce degree in finance from Saint Mary's University and an MBA from the University of Windsor, spent five years as a commercial account manager in banking and close to a decade in management at General Motors, and served thirteen years in the Canadian Forces Reserves. She completed two terms on the board of governors of St. Clair College, including two years as its chair, and taught for six years at the University of Windsor's Odette School of Business.

Steve Mastroianni (Liberal) — A government relations manager living in Windsor, Mastroianni carried the Liberal nomination.

Kyle Prestanski (Green Party) — Prestanski was a graduate assistant at the University of Windsor.

About the Riding

Few places in Canada were hit harder by the events of 2008. Windsor's economy was built on vehicle assembly, engines, tooling and the hundreds of parts plants that fed them, and all of it was tied to Detroit. In May 2008 General Motors announced that its Windsor transmission plant would close in 2010, winding up a presence in the city stretching back some ninety years. Chrysler's Windsor Assembly Plant, which built minivans, remained the largest single private employer in the area, but shift reductions, falling truck and van sales and the credit collapse of September left thousands of families waiting to learn whether their plant would run in the new year. Windsor's unemployment rate was already the highest among Canada's large cities before the crisis deepened.

The Town of Tecumseh, with 24,224 residents at the 2006 census, presented a different face: a settled lakeshore suburb with higher household incomes, French-Canadian and Italian roots, and marinas and parks along the St. Clair shoreline. Much of the riding's Windsor side was built in the 1950s and 1960s for autoworkers, and by 2008 many of those households were headed by retirees drawing pensions from companies whose solvency was suddenly an open question.

The border was the other permanent issue. The Windsor-Detroit crossing carried a large share of Canada-United States trade, and truck traffic funnelled through city streets to the privately owned Ambassador Bridge. On 1 May 2008 the federal transport minister welcomed the recommendation of the Windsor-Essex Parkway as the preferred route for a new access road from Highway 401 to a proposed public crossing downriver, the product of years of study under the Detroit River International Crossing process. Bridge ownership, customs staffing, wait times and post-2001 American security requirements affected daily life here more directly than anywhere else in Ontario, and ran through the campaign alongside the fate of the auto industry.