Winnipeg South, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Winnipeg South

Everything in Winnipeg below Bishop Grandin Boulevard belongs to this riding: new subdivisions, big-box retail along Kenaston Boulevard, and the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba. It is suburban in a way no other Winnipeg seat is, and it had a habit to match. At every general election since the constituency was revived in 1988 it had sent its member to Ottawa on the government side — Progressive Conservative, then Liberal, then Conservative.

Candidates

Rod Bruinooge (Conservative) — Born at Thompson in 1973, Bruinooge took a political science degree at the University of Manitoba and ran an internet and multimedia firm in Winnipeg before entering politics. He took Winnipeg South in January 2006 in one of the tightest contests anywhere in the country, unseating Treasury Board president Reg Alcock. Through the 39th Parliament he served as parliamentary secretary to the minister of Indian affairs and northern development, holding the post until dissolution. He was among the most visible backers of Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, a private member's bill from Alberta MP Ken Epp that cleared second reading in March 2008 and died on the order paper in September. The Campaign Life Coalition endorsed him publicly during the campaign.

John Loewen (Liberal) — Born at Elkhorn in 1949, Loewen took a science degree at the University of Manitoba and spent his career in payment processing: he joined Comcheq Services in 1973, was its president from 1984 to 1998 and oversaw its move into CIBC ownership, and afterwards led Telpay. He won the new provincial seat of Fort Whyte for the Progressive Conservatives in 1999, served as his party's finance and intergovernmental affairs critic, was re-elected in 2003 and resigned from the legislature in September 2005 to seek a federal Liberal nomination, saying he had never accepted the policies of the former Alliance and Reform parties. He ran in Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia in 2006 and was acclaimed in Winnipeg South in 2007.

Sean Robert (NDP) — Robert worked as a product consultant for the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission and lived in the riding.

David Cosby (Green Party) — Cosby, an electrical engineer, was the Green candidate.

Heidi Loewen-Steffano carried the Christian Heritage Party banner.

About the Riding

The University of Manitoba anchors the constituency. Its Fort Garry campus is the province's largest post-secondary institution and one of the biggest employers on the south side of the city, drawing tens of thousands of students, staff and researchers along the Pembina Highway corridor every weekday. Around it sit Fort Richmond and Richmond West, older middle-class districts, and to the west the newer and considerably wealthier developments of Whyte Ridge, Linden Woods and Waverley Heights, where household incomes run well above the city average.

Retail and commercial development along Kenaston and Pembina supplies much of the private-sector employment, and the residential fringe was still pushing southwest across former farmland when the campaign began. Transit service on the Pembina corridor, and the long-argued question of a dedicated rapid transit route into downtown, was a standing municipal grievance that spilled into federal arguments about infrastructure money.

Manitoba's economy was less exposed than southern Ontario's to the manufacturing collapse of 2008, and the September market crash reached this riding through savings and retirement accounts rather than layoffs. Local debate ran instead on university research funding, infrastructure for the city's growing southwest, and the Liberal Green Shift carbon tax plan. Bruinooge's position on abortion and his support for Bill C-484 drew attention through the campaign, and the Campaign Life Coalition endorsement kept the subject in the local news.