Created in 2003, the then-new federal riding of Newmarket-Aurora is one in which voters sent a local member of Parliament to Ottawa’s House of Commons for the first time in 2004.
It was created by merging half of the riding of York North with 24 per cent of Vaughan-King-Aurora, and is one of eight federal ridings in York Region proper.
The riding of York-Simcoe covers a small portion of York Region that borders Bradford West Gwillimbury, north of Davis Drive West near Hwy. 400.
The Newmarket-Aurora riding, one of 338 federal electoral districts across Canada, is comprised of the Town of Newmarket, a pocket of Aurora north of Wellington Street West and Wellington Street East up to St. John’s Sideroad, and a small slice of East Gwillimbury just south of Green Lane West and Green Lane East, west of Hwy. 404.
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Politically, Newmarket-Aurora was held by the Conservatives in 2004-2005 with the election of Belinda Stronach, who then crossed the floor to the Liberals in 2005, and retained the Liberal seat in the 2006 federal election with 46 per cent of the popular vote. During that election, Stronach bested Conservative challenger Lois Brown by nearly 5,000 votes.
Brown took a second shot at the riding in 2008 and won it back for the Conservatives with 47 per cent of the popular vote. She handily bested Liberal competitor Kyle Peterson in 2011 with 54 per cent of the popular vote, only to lose to Peterson in the 2015 federal election by a slim margin of 1,451 votes.
Peterson announced in March 2019 that he is leaving politics to spend more time with his young family.
According to 2016 census data, the federal riding of Newmarket-Aurora has grown by 7.3 per cent over the past five years, with a population pegged at 117,418, of which 80,525 are aged 15 to 64, or 69 per cent of the population.
The top languages spoken other than English are Mandarin, Russian, Farsi, and Cantonese.
In 2015, the median household income in Newmarket was $116,456, exceeding the provincial average of $75,287. Newmarket’s nearly 90,000 population, specifically, are educated with more than half having post-secondary education, with 25 per cent of residents holding a university degree.
Twenty-eight per cent of residents were born outside Canada, and a majority of Newmarket residents own their own homes (80 per cent), with about 20 per cent renting. Almost 60 per cent are married, and more than half of the town’s homes have children.
One of Newmarket’s claims to fame is that about 50 per cent of residents have less than a 30-minute commute to work, according to the Town of Newmarket’s Community Report 2016-2017.
Other town highlights include it receiving accolades for its Main Street and being named in several best places to live in Canada reports, almost 50 kilometres of walking and biking trails, 41,000 jobs and 2,400 local employers, and hundreds of festivals and events each year.
Here are the federal political candidates vying for your vote in the Oct. 21, 2019 general election:
Liberal Party - Tony Van Bynen
Conservative Party - Lois Brown
NDP - Yvonne Kelly
Green Party - Walter Bauer
People’s Party - Andrew I. McCaughtrie
