York South—Weston, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

York South—Weston

Two rail corridors and the Humber valley give York South—Weston its outline. The riding takes in most of what was the City of York before amalgamation, plus Mount Dennis and the old village of Weston, running from Highway 401 down to the CN main line and east as far as Caledonia Road and Dufferin Street. It is compact, densely built and among the poorest constituencies in Toronto.

Candidates

Alan Tonks (Liberal) — Tonks had represented the riding since 2000 and was seeking a fourth term. His career before Ottawa was almost entirely municipal: two years on York's Board of Control from 1978, mayor of the City of York from 1982 to 1987, then chairman of Metropolitan Toronto from 1987 until amalgamation abolished the office in 1997. He led the transition team that stood up the new City of Toronto, chaired the short-lived Greater Toronto Services Board, and was parliamentary secretary to the environment minister in 2003. He taught junior high for the Scarborough Board of Education and holds master's degrees from York University and the University of Toronto.

Mike Sullivan (NDP) — Sullivan was making his first run for federal office. A Weston resident with a science degree from the University of Toronto, he spent a decade at the CBC running radio master control before leaving in 1984, then spent the following two decades and more as a national representative for the broadcast technicians' union and its successor, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, bargaining for staff at the CBC, Sun Media and Torstar. He chaired the Weston Community Coalition, the residents' group leading the fight over the rail corridor.

Aydin Cocelli (Conservative) — Cocelli ran a restaurant in Toronto and stood for the Conservative Party.

Andre Papadimitriou (Green) — Papadimitriou was the Green Party candidate.

About the Riding

The industrial base that built this part of Toronto had largely gone by 2008. Kodak Canada had occupied its ground near Eglinton Avenue and Weston Road since 1913 and once employed three thousand people there; the company announced the closure in 2004 and wound up soon after, with about 800 jobs still on the books. CCM and Moffat had left earlier. Weston–Mount Dennis was among the thirteen neighbourhoods the City of Toronto designated for targeted reinvestment, and the loss of the Kodak works was regularly cited as the reason.

The rail corridor was the live federal question of the moment. The province and its agencies were preparing to widen the Georgetown corridor and to add a privately run diesel express between Union Station and Pearson airport, branded Blue 22, running straight through Weston. Residents fought it on two fronts: they objected to level crossings such as John Street being severed by the widened right-of-way, and they wanted trains to stop in Weston rather than pass through. Diesel exhaust along a corridor lined with houses and schools became the sharpest local grievance of the campaign, and the environmental assessment was still unfinished when the writ dropped.

Politically the riding had been shifting. New Democrat Paul Ferreira narrowly took the provincial seat at a by-election in February 2007 before losing it that October, evidence that the Liberal hold here was no longer automatic.

The population was heavily immigrant and strikingly varied: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish-speaking Latin American, Caribbean, Somali and Filipino communities lived alongside a smaller base of long-settled anglophone residents. Weston Road remained the main shopping street, a low-rise strip that had drawn little new building for a generation, with Mount Dennis above the Humber in the west and Keelesdale and Eglinton West to the east. Settlement funding, affordable housing, employment insurance access for people in precarious work, and credentials recognition for internationally trained newcomers came up more often on the doorstep than the national campaign's set pieces.