Winnipeg Centre, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Winnipeg Centre

Eight names appeared on the Winnipeg Centre ballot in 2008, an unusually long list for a Manitoba riding. The constituency ran from the Red River west to the city limit, bounded south by the Assiniboine and north by the Canadian Pacific main line, taking in downtown, the warehouse blocks of the Exchange District, the West End around Sargent and Ellice, West Broadway, Wolseley and the flats of south Point Douglas. By several measures it was the poorest federal riding in the country.

Candidates

Pat Martin (NDP) — Martin was born in Winnipeg in 1955 and left Argyle High School in 1974. As a teenager he went north to work in a Yukon asbestos mine, an experience that made asbestos regulation a personal campaign for the rest of his career. He worked as a journeyman carpenter in forestry, mining and construction, ran the Manitoba Carpenters Union as business manager from 1989 to 1997 and served as a vice-president of the Manitoba Federation of Labour. Elected in 1997 and returned three times since, he had become a persistent voice on government operations and accountability. Asked what mattered most in the riding, he named the marginalisation of Indigenous young people, saying there was no silver bullet but that identifying it as a key social objective was the first step.

Kenny Daodu (Conservative) — Daodu worked in health and social services in Winnipeg. Her message was that little had been done about the riding's poverty for a long time, and that lower taxes were the answer.

Dan Hurley (Liberal) — A university administrator, Hurley also identified poverty as the riding's defining problem and wanted federal money put into recreation and athletic facilities and into structured programmes for children.

Jessie Klassen (Green Party) — Klassen noted that household incomes in Winnipeg Centre were among the lowest in Canada and argued for a genuine progress indicator to measure what the gross domestic product misses, alongside her party's guaranteed liveable income proposal.

Four others rounded out the ballot: Darrell Rankin for the Communist Party, long-time head of its Manitoba organisation, who called for a $15 minimum wage and a large cooperative housing programme; Joe Chan, an independent business consultant who wanted the constituency office open far longer hours to help new immigrants; Lyle Morrisseau of the First Peoples National Party of Canada, from Fort Alexander, who argued that no part of Winnipeg would be safe until poverty was addressed; and Ed Ackerman, an independent filmmaker photographing every boarded-up house in the riding and proposing to match them with people who had none.

About the Riding

Poverty was not one issue among several here; it was the frame every candidate used. Incidence of low income in the core neighbourhoods ran far above the city and national averages, rental housing predominated, and vacant and boarded properties were common enough to become a campaign prop. A large share of residents were Indigenous, several times the national proportion, and the gap between that population's circumstances and the city's overall prosperity shaped debates over policing, addictions, child welfare and schooling.

The West End was also Winnipeg's principal immigrant reception area. Sargent and Ellice Avenues carried Filipino, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Portuguese and South Asian businesses within a few blocks of one another, and immigration casework made up a large share of the local member's office traffic.

Against that, the riding held a disproportionate share of the city's institutions. The Health Sciences Centre and the University of Winnipeg were major employers, government offices and banks filled the downtown towers, the Exchange District's Edwardian warehouses housed galleries and film production, and The Forks drew more than four million visitors a year, the most-visited site in Manitoba.

The politics followed from Winnipeg's labour history. The 1919 general strike began a few blocks from what became the riding's downtown core, and the tradition of independent labour and social democratic representation it established had held ever since. Winnipeg Centre in its modern form had gone to the New Democrats at every election since it was recreated for the 1997 vote.