Prince Edward—Hastings

Prince Edward—Hastings is a sprawling rural riding in eastern Ontario that stretches from the shores of Lake Ontario northward deep into the Canadian Shield. It encompasses all of Prince Edward County — a peninsula jutting into Lake Ontario connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus — along with much of Hastings County, including the City of Belleville, the towns of Deseronto and Bancroft, the village of Madoc, and the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. The riding excluded the city of Quinte West (Trenton) to the west.

Candidates

Daryl Kramp (Conservative) — Kramp was the incumbent, first elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2006 and 2008. Born in Kirkland Lake in 1947, he worked as an investigator with the Ontario Provincial Police for five years before moving to Madoc, where he operated several small businesses including a bakery, a sports store, and the Two Loons restaurant. He served as a municipal councillor and deputy reeve in the municipality of Madoc before entering federal politics.

Michael McMahon (NDP) — McMahon was a retired educator who had taught locally and internationally, including in Papua New Guinea. He served as branch president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation and sat on multiple major committees within the organization. He had also run as the NDP candidate in the riding in the 2008 election, campaigning on employment, affordable housing, health care, and elderly poverty.

Peter Tinsley (Liberal) — Tinsley was a retired lieutenant-colonel and military lawyer with a 28-year career in the Canadian Armed Forces. He had served in the office of the Judge Advocate General and was the senior prosecutor of Canadian soldiers during the Somalia Inquiry into the 1993 killing of a Somali teenager by Canadian paratroopers. After retiring from the military, he served as Director of Ontario's Special Investigations Unit for five years and worked as an international war crimes prosecutor in Kosovo and Bosnia. He was subsequently appointed as the chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, serving from 2005 to 2009.

Patrick Larkin (Green Party) — Larkin was the founder of Debug Computers, one of the first rural internet service providers in Prince Edward County. He was active in the local arts community, having served as chair of the Prince Edward Arts Council, co-founded the Prince Edward Jazz Festival, and participated as a director and actor with the Prince Edward Community Theatre.

Tim Hickey ran as an Independent and Andrew Skinner stood for the Progressive Canadian Party.

About the Riding

The riding's geography ranges dramatically from the limestone-and-sandbank shorelines of Prince Edward County to the rugged Shield country around Bancroft in north Hastings. Prince Edward County, with a population of roughly 25,000, had by 2011 become a prominent tourism and culinary destination, with a growing cluster of wineries, artisan food producers, and galleries drawing visitors to its lakefront communities of Picton, Wellington, and Bloomfield. Sandbanks Provincial Park, with the world's largest freshwater baymouth sand dune system, is one of Ontario's most visited provincial parks.

Belleville, the riding's largest population centre with approximately 49,000 residents, serves as a regional commercial hub on the Bay of Quinte. The city's economy relies on a mix of manufacturing, health care through Quinte Health Care's Belleville General Hospital, and the nearby presence of 8 Wing/CFB Trenton — Canada's largest air force base — located just outside the riding boundary in Quinte West but exerting a major economic influence on the region.

North Hastings around Bancroft and Madoc is characterized by cottage country, forestry, and mining heritage. The Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory near Deseronto is home to the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. Federal issues in 2011 included rural health care access, support for agriculture and the emerging County wine and tourism industry, military family services, and economic development in the northern Shield communities.