Charlottetown, PE — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Charlottetown

The 2003 boundary order described this seat in a single clause: it consists of the City of Charlottetown, and nothing more. The city had taken its present shape on 1 April 1995, when a provincial reorganisation folded the town of Parkdale and the villages of Sherwood, Winsloe, East Royalty, Hillsborough Park and West Royalty into the old municipality and annexed the Queens Royalty common. The federal seat came later. Until the 2003 readjustment the capital was the core of a riding called Hillsborough; Charlottetown replaced it and drew almost all of its territory from that seat. The city stands where three tidal rivers — the Hillsborough, the North and the West — open into the harbour.

Candidates

Shawn Murphy (Liberal) — Murphy was born in Charlottetown in 1951, attended the University of Prince Edward Island and took his law degree at the University of New Brunswick in 1976. He returned to the Island to practise, for a period in the same office as the future premier Joe Ghiz, and was named Queen's Counsel in 1997. He won Hillsborough in 2000 and carried the redrawn Charlottetown in 2004 and 2006. Under Paul Martin he was parliamentary secretary to the minister of fisheries and oceans, with responsibility for the Oceans Action Plan; once the Liberals were in opposition he took the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, a post he still held when the writs were issued.

Tom DeBlois (Conservative) — A business manager from Charlottetown, DeBlois carried the Conservative standard in a province where the party was trying to end a long drought. No one other than a Liberal had been sent to the Commons from anywhere on Prince Edward Island since 1984.

Brian Pollard (NDP) — A Charlottetown filmmaker, Pollard stood for the New Democrats, who had never elected a member of Parliament on the Island.

Laura M. Bisaillon (Green Party) — A health researcher, Bisaillon ran for the Greens, who fielded candidates in each of the four Island ridings in 2008.

Baird Judson, a retired professor, appeared on the ballot for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Payrolls here lean on institutions rather than industry. The provincial legislature and departments sit in the city, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital is the province's main acute-care centre, and Holland College's Prince of Wales campus and the University of Prince Edward Island draw students from across the Maritimes. The largest federal presence is Veterans Affairs Canada, whose national headquarters was moved out of Ottawa in the early 1980s as part of a decentralisation push and now occupies the Daniel J. MacDonald Building downtown. It is the only major federal department run from outside the capital, and it ties a share of local household income directly to decisions taken in Ottawa.

Visitors supply much of the remainder. Province House, where the 1864 conference that led to Confederation was held, stands a short walk from the Confederation Centre of the Arts, which has staged the Charlottetown Festival and its Anne of Green Gables musical since the mid-1960s. Cruise ships call at the harbour through late summer and autumn, and Charlottetown Airport, in the Sherwood area, handles the riding's air links. Retail and services along University Avenue and through the west end round out the local economy.

When the campaign opened in September 2008 the seat had gone Liberal at every election since it was created, and the collapse in credit markets that autumn pushed the economy to the centre of a contest that had begun on other ground.