Windsor West, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Windsor West

Windsor West takes in everything in Ontario's southernmost city lying west and south of a line run down Langlois Avenue to Tecumseh Road East and out to Pillette Road. Detroit stands directly opposite across the river, and three international crossings come ashore inside the boundaries: the Ambassador Bridge, the vehicle tunnel that surfaces beside Goyeau Street, and the Michigan Central railway tunnel west of downtown. Sandwich anchors the western end, Ojibway and South Windsor the southern, and the commercial streets around Ouellette Avenue sit between them.

Candidates

Brian Masse (NDP) — Masse reached the Commons through a by-election in May 2002 and had been returned at the two general elections since, making 2008 his fourth campaign in the seat. He came to federal politics from Windsor city council, where he had held the Ward 2 seat from 1997, and had earlier worked in employment and settlement services for local non-profit agencies after taking a sociology degree at Wilfrid Laurier University in 1991. Through the 39th Parliament he handled his party's automotive and border files and argued that a second Detroit River crossing should be publicly owned.

Lisa Lumley (Conservative) — A legal assistant living in the riding, Lumley carried the Conservative nomination in a constituency the party had not held in decades.

Larry Horwitz (Liberal) — Horwitz was a Windsor businessman whose family firm held commercial property in the city centre, and he was active in the Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association.

John Esposito (Green) — Esposito, who worked in retail in Windsor, stood for the Green Party.

Elizabeth Rowley, a Toronto-based party organiser, ran for the Communist Party, and Margaret Villamizar, a language assessor from Windsor, for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Nothing organised local politics here more completely than the river. About a quarter of the goods traded between the two countries moved across a single privately held span, whose tolls, capacity and future had been argued over for a decade. The binational crossing study settled on a new bridge from Brighton Beach in Windsor's west end to Delray in Detroit, and on 1 May 2008 Ottawa and Queen's Park named the Windsor–Essex Parkway as the preferred access road from Highway 401. The city put forward its own GreenLink alternative that summer and was rebuffed. Route, expropriation and the ownership question were unavoidable for every candidate.

The campaign coincided with the worst weeks of the autumn financial crisis, and Windsor came into it already weakened. Ford idled its Essex Engine Plant in 2007, parts suppliers across Essex County had been cutting shifts for years, and the city carried one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The assembly plants lie east of the riding line, but the households drawing wages from them are spread across the whole city.

Downtown had a rarer piece of news that year: the riverfront casino took the Caesars Windsor name on 19 June 2008, when an expansion opened a 5,000-seat theatre, a convention centre and the 27-storey Augustus hotel tower. Post-secondary education was the other steady employer, with the University of Windsor near the bridge approach and St. Clair College's main campus at the riding's southern end.

Sandwich carried a different burden. Since the late 1990s the bridge company had bought houses on Indian Road and the streets beside its plaza; after the city refused demolition permits, more than a hundred stood boarded up, hollowing out blocks of an eighteenth-century settlement. Long-settled Italian, French-Canadian and Lebanese families lived alongside more recent Arab, South Asian and African arrivals, and employment insurance eligibility, federal support for the auto sector and the border file dominated the doorsteps.