Halifax West, NS — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Halifax West

Halifax West grew faster through the 2000s than almost any other seat in Nova Scotia. The 2006 census counted 88,756 residents, up about eleven per cent in five years, driven by subdivision building in Bedford and Hammonds Plains. At 564 square kilometres it was also far larger than its suburban reputation suggests: from the western edge of the Halifax peninsula it ran north through Bedford to the Hants County line and Pockwock Lake, west along Highway 3 through Timberlea, Lakeside and Hubley, and south to the coastal villages of Prospect and Terence Bay.

Candidates

Geoff Regan (Liberal) — Regan finished at Sackville High School in 1977, took political science at St. Francis Xavier University and law at Dalhousie, and was admitted to the Nova Scotia bar in 1984. He practised in Bedford and Halifax, largely commercial and real-estate work. He won the seat in 1993, lost it in 1997 in a contest shaped by anger over changes to employment insurance, and regained it in 2000. He served as parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, then as minister of fisheries and oceans from December 2003 until the change of government in 2006, and was the opposition critic for human resources and skills development afterwards. His father, Gerald Regan, was premier of Nova Scotia through the 1970s and later a federal cabinet minister.

Tamara Lorincz (NDP) — Lorincz holds a combined law degree and MBA in environmental law and management from Dalhousie. She was executive director of the Nova Scotia Environmental Network, a co-founder of the East Coast Environmental Law Association, and had helped establish the Atlantic Canada Sustainability Initiative.

Rakesh Khosla (Conservative) — A life insurance broker, Khosla stood for the Conservatives, who were pressing hard in suburban Nova Scotia in 2008.

Michael Munday (Green Party) — A professional quantity surveyor from Hatchet Lake, Munday carried the Green Party's campaign in Halifax West.

Trevor Ennis, a swimming pool sales agent, was the Christian Heritage Party candidate.

About the Riding

This is commuter country. Bedford, once a separate town and now part of the Halifax Regional Municipality, is the riding's commercial hub, and the newer neighbourhoods spreading north and west of it filled with families working elsewhere in the metropolitan area — downtown offices, the military installations, the hospitals and the public service. Retail and services along the Bedford Highway and at the Bayers Lake business park supply much of the employment inside the riding itself.

The riding also holds Mount Saint Vincent University, on the Bedford Highway at Rockingham. Founded by the Sisters of Charity in 1873 to train teachers and granted university status in 1966, the Mount is a mainly undergraduate institution known for education, child and youth study, public relations and distance learning. Around it, the mainland-north neighbourhoods of Rockingham and Clayton Park give the seat a dense urban section quite unlike its outer reaches.

Growth on that scale strained roads, schools and water systems, and the daily commute into the city core was a standing complaint. Along the southern coast, Prospect and Terence Bay keep a small inshore fishery and a settlement pattern much older than the subdivisions inland.

Regan had won the seat four times and lost it once, in 1997, a year when the Liberals were shut out of Nova Scotia entirely. Suburban seats were among the Conservatives' stated targets in 2008, and the New Democrats were pushing to extend their Halifax-area base outward. The economy dominated the closing weeks as credit markets seized in October.