Calgary—Nose Hill, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Calgary—Nose Hill

Calgary—Nose Hill occupied 93 square kilometres on the city's northwestern rim, where subdivisions were still being staked against farmland. Centre Street North and Harvest Hills Boulevard formed its eastern edge; Beddington Trail, Berkshire Boulevard, 14 Street NW, John Laurie Boulevard, Shaganappi Trail and Crowchild Trail closed it off to the southeast and south; north and west it ran to the municipal limits. Nose Hill Park, a broad expanse of native fescue grassland on a glacial upland, sat inside the southern boundary and gave the seat its name. Panorama Hills, Hidden Valley, MacEwan Glen, Edgemont and Harvest Hills were among the communities within, and the riding reached northwest as far as Tuscany and Rocky Ridge at the city's edge.

Candidates

Diane Ablonczy (Conservative) — Born in 1949 and raised in a succession of rural Alberta towns, Ablonczy taught school before qualifying in law and running a general practice in Calgary through the 1980s. She joined the Reform Association of Canada in 1987, was in at the party's founding later that year and served two terms as its first chairman, then left her practice in 1991 to work for Preston Manning on party communications and strategy. She won Calgary North in the 1993 election that brought Reform to Ottawa and had represented Calgary—Nose Hill since 1997. She was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance from February 2006 and became Secretary of State for Small Business and Tourism in August 2007. She was the sitting member.

Anoush Newman (Liberal) — An executive director working in Calgary, Newman carried the Liberal banner in one of the party's least promising seats in the country.

Tony Hajj (Green Party) — An engineer living in Calgary, Hajj ran for the Greens.

Stephanie Sundberg (NDP) — A student, Sundberg was the New Democrat candidate.

About the Riding

This was suburban Calgary at its newest, and at 130,942 residents in the 2006 census it was also among the most populous ridings in the country. Most of the housing dated from after 1990, much of it from after 2000, and the demographic profile followed: young families, high rates of home ownership, incomes above the city median, and a population that had grown fast enough to leave schools and community facilities perpetually behind. Panorama Hills alone went from open land in the late 1990s to one of the city's largest communities within a decade. Chinese, South Asian and Filipino families made up a growing share of buyers in the newer phases.

Employment was overwhelmingly downtown or in the northwest office and industrial parks — engineering firms, energy service companies, professional practices — reached by a commute down Beddington Trail and Deerfoot Trail that got worse every year the subdivisions extended north. Retail followed the population up Country Hills Boulevard. There was no LRT service in the riding, and the long-discussed north-central line remained a municipal plan rather than a construction project, which made road capacity the dominant local infrastructure argument.

Federal politics in 2008 played out largely on national terrain. The Liberal carbon tax proposal was the central issue Conservative canvassers raised at the door, framed as a direct cost to an economy built on oil and gas. As the campaign wore into October and crude fell steeply from its summer record, the government's economic management became the counter-argument the opposition tried to use. Beyond that, the concerns residents named were the ordinary ones of fast-growing suburbs: school construction, family tax measures, waiting times for medical care, and infrastructure money for a city adding the population of a mid-sized town every year. Ablonczy went into the campaign with fifteen years in the Commons behind her and a place in a caucus drawn heavily from Alberta.