Calgary East, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Calgary East

Calgary East ran from 16 Avenue NE south and east to the city limits, reaching west across Deerfoot Trail to Nose Creek, the Bow and the Elbow. Within its 114 square kilometres sat the oldest and least affluent of Calgary's suburbs — Forest Lawn, Albert Park–Radisson Heights, Dover, Erin Woods, Penbrooke Meadows, Marlborough, Applewood Park and Abbeydale — strung along 17 Avenue SE and the industrial edges of the rail corridor, together with Inglewood at the western tip.

Candidates

Deepak Obhrai (Conservative) — Born in Oldeani, in what was then Tanganyika, in 1950, Obhrai went to school there and at Daly College in Indore, trained as an air traffic controller in Britain and worked in the trade back in Tanzania before bringing his family to Calgary in 1977. He retrained as an accountant and, with his wife, built a dry-cleaning business to three locations. He headed the India-Canada Association and the Hindu Society of Calgary, and took Calgary East for Reform in 1997, holding it through three further campaigns as the party became the Canadian Alliance and then the Conservative Party. Since February 2006 he had been parliamentary secretary at Foreign Affairs, with responsibility for International Cooperation added in March 2008, a posting that kept him abroad on the government's behalf. He was the sitting member.

Ian Vaughan (NDP) — A youth worker in Calgary, Vaughan ran for the New Democrats in a riding whose income profile suggested the party should compete but where it never had.

Nathan David Coates (Green Party) — A mechanic living in Calgary, Coates stood for the Greens.

Bernie Kennedy (Liberal) — A businessman who listed his residence as Granum, a village in southern Alberta well outside the city, Kennedy carried the Liberal nomination.

Jason Devine (Communist) — A student in Calgary, Devine ran for the Communist Party.

About the Riding

Forest Lawn was a town in its own right until Calgary absorbed it in 1961, and the seam still showed in the street grid and the housing stock. Its main street, 17 Avenue SE, became a business revitalization zone in 1993 and by 2008 was branded International Avenue — a run of restaurants, groceries, halal butchers, travel agents and money-transfer offices opened by families from Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Latin America and East Africa.

The riding held 110,479 people at the 2006 census, and its economy was retail, trades, transport and warehousing rather than the downtown towers a few kilometres west. Incomes ran well below the Calgary average, rental housing made up a much larger share of the stock than in the city's newer quadrants, and the boom of the mid-2000s had pushed rents up faster than wages at the low end. Calgary's apartment vacancy rate fell to 0.5% in the autumn of 2006, among the lowest of any major centre in the country, and shelters and food banks in the east end were carrying loads they had not seen before.

Local campaign issues followed from that. Settlement services, credential recognition and processing times for family sponsorship mattered in a riding where a large share of residents had arrived within the previous fifteen years. Public safety and policing were raised repeatedly, as was transit service east of Deerfoot Trail, which lagged the city's northwest and south. And the campaign's last three weeks coincided with the collapse of credit markets abroad and the slide in oil prices, which turned an argument about the Liberal carbon tax proposal into a broader question about whether Alberta's run was ending. Obhrai's eleven years in the seat and his work with the riding's community organisations had kept Calgary East a Conservative hold despite a demographic profile that elsewhere in Canada favoured other parties.