BRAMPTON, Ont. — Nobody here lives alone.

Cousins live with aunts. Friends live with co-workers. Uncles take in children of friends they knew back in the “old country”.

In all of Canada, there is no riding that has fewer people living by themselves than the new-for-2015 riding of Brampton East. When Statistics Canada completed its last census in 2011, it found just 1% of the 99,700 people in this riding lived alone. Brampton West was number two in that category at 1.9%, Brampton North number four at 2.2%. The other two Brampton ridings are not far behind. The national average is 11%.

So that means there’s a lot of families here in this suburban city northwest of the country’s busiest airport, Lester B. Pearson International Airport. And since no social unit is getting more attention from our politicians than families in this political season, the good people of Brampton can expect campaigners of all shades to be frequent visitors leading up to Oct. 19.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair was there Saturday, drawing an enthusiastic, overflow crowd of close to 900 to a lunchtime rally at a banquet centre. He wants those families, of course, to vote for his candidates.

But to do that he or any other leader hoping to find votes here, must fine-tune their pitch for a particular kind of family: The young kind.

Only the eastern Arctic riding of Nunavut has fewer people in it who are 50 years of age or older than Brampton West. Brampton East is not far behind. As is the rest of the Brampton.

And then there’s this: Brampton is the eastern epicentre for Canada’s Sikh community. All five ridings have a high percentage of speakers of Punjabi — the language spoken in the mountainous northern India heartland of the world’s Sikhs. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has travelled there twice and for no other reason than because “photo ops” at Sikh holy sites like the Golden Temple in Amritsar are vote winners in crucial ridings back home.

Brampton East, North, and South are numbers 2,4 and 5 among all ridings in the country for their concentration of Punjabi speakers.

The western epicentre for Sikh voters is in ridings in and around Surrey, B.C. — the riding of Surrey-Newton is tops in the country with 41% of residents speaking Punjabi — but there are also significant groups of Sikh voters in northeast Calgary and in southeast Edmonton.

Their religion is not what distinguishes their voting patterns. What does distinguish voting behaviour in Punjabi-speaking, Mandarin-speaking, Tagalog-speaking and almost all first-generation Canadian communities is that they view politics as a transactional activity. They may have voted Tory in the past, but if a better deal from a different group comes along, they’ll take the better deal and become New Democrats or Liberals.

So, to seal the deal in Brampton — or in suburban Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, or Vancouver — the party with the right mix of family-friendly transactional voters has the inside track.

Polling firm Mainstreet Research surveyed more than 5,000 Canadians on Monday and Tuesday last week, almost at the same time that seven months worth of enhanced and enriched child benefit cheques were boosting bank accounts of parents everywhere and, lo and behold, Mainstreet found a huge bump for the Tories.

But the Liberals are offering a child benefit that will be even richer for most of these voters.

And, in Brampton Saturday, Mulcair’s second-biggest cheer from the partisan crowd came when he repeated his promise to subsidize daycare so that it would not cost more than $15-a-day per child. Brampton, Mulcair said, had the highest daycare costs in Canada, absorbing as much as 30 per cent of the annual income of women there.

The biggest cheer came from a promise to give more to the provinces for public transit. That’s huge in suburban Toronto and Vancouver. Brampton has some of the most clogged transportation arteries in Canada, led by Highway 401, just off its southern border, which is the third busiest chunk of super-highway anywhere in North America!

The NDP strength here is surprising though it comes after years of work here by both the provincial and federal parties. The provincial NDP saw their first big breakthrough here in 2011 when Jagmeet Singh won Bramalea-Gore-Malton and became the first turbaned Sikh in Ontario’s legislature.

But both Conservatives and Liberals enjoy strength here as well and, they too, are touting policies this election season aimed at that most valuable of voter, young families with children.