Calgary Northeast, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Calgary Northeast

For the first time since 1993 the seat was open. Art Hanger, who had won Calgary Northeast in the Reform Party's breakthrough that October and held it through four further elections, announced in the autumn of 2007 that he would not stand again, leaving the nomination and the riding to a first-time candidate. The district covered 127 square kilometres of the city's northeast corner, bounded by the municipal limits on the north and east, 16 Avenue NE on the south, and Deerfoot Trail, Beddington Trail, Harvest Hills Boulevard and Centre Street North on the west. Calgary International Airport sat inside it, along with Whitehorn, Rundle, Pineridge, Temple, Falconridge, Castleridge, Monterey Park, Martindale, Taradale, Coral Springs and Saddle Ridge, and Coventry Hills and Country Hills at the northwest corner.

Candidates

Devinder Shory (Conservative) — Shory was born in 1958 in Barnala, in the Punjab, the second-youngest of eight children, and read arts and law at Punjabi University in Patiala before practising there. After emigrating he put his foreign credentials through the University of Alberta in 1997, joined the Alberta bar the following year, and set up his own firm in northeast Calgary. The 2008 campaign was his first as a federal candidate.

Sanam S. Kang (Liberal) — A self-employed Calgarian, Kang ran for the Liberals in a riding where the party had once been competitive and hoped to be again with the seat vacant.

Roger Richard (No Affiliation) — A business owner in Calgary, Richard ran without a party label.

Vinay Dey (NDP) — Retired and living in Calgary, Dey carried the New Democrat nomination.

Abeed Monty Ahmad (Green Party) — A teacher in Calgary, Ahmad stood for the Greens.

Daniel Blanchard (Marxist-Leninist) — A student, Blanchard was the Marxist-Leninist candidate.

About the Riding

Calgary Northeast counted 129,015 residents at the 2006 census, an 18% increase over five years and among the largest populations of any federal riding in Canada. Almost all of it was built after 1980, in successive waves of subdivisions pushed out toward the airport and the eastern city limit — Falconridge and Castleridge in the 1980s, Martindale and Taradale and Coral Springs in the 1990s, Saddle Ridge filling in through the 2000s. The result was a district where a large share of households had arrived recently, both from overseas and from elsewhere in Canada.

Punjabi, Tagalog, Urdu, Arabic and Vietnamese were widely spoken. Gurdwaras, mosques, temples and evangelical churches functioned as the main organising institutions in neighbourhoods that had few older civic ones, and commercial strips along 52 Street, Falconridge Boulevard and Westwinds Drive filled with restaurants, groceries and professional offices serving them. The airport was the single largest economic anchor, supplying jobs in cargo, maintenance, security and hospitality alongside the construction and oilfield service work that drew people north in the first place.

What residents raised in 2008 was mostly about arriving and keeping up. Immigration processing times and family sponsorship backlogs came up constantly. So did the pace of public construction: the northeast leg of the LRT had only reached McKnight–Westwinds in December 2007 and stopped well short of the newest communities, schools were on rotating portables, and recreation facilities lagged years behind occupancy permits. Housing costs, which had roughly doubled across Calgary during the boom, pressed hardest on the newest arrivals. Turnout in the northeast ran consistently below the city average, a pattern every campaign in the riding tried and failed to change.