Calgary Southeast, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Calgary Southeast

Calgary Southeast took in everything east and south of the CP main line, Glenmore Trail, Deerfoot Trail and 114 Avenue SE, out to the municipal limits — 119 square kilometres of lake communities and half-finished subdivisions. Acadia, Willow Park, Lake Bonavista, Midnapore, Queensland, Deer Run, Deer Ridge, Sundance, Douglasdale, McKenzie Lake and Riverbend formed its older half; McKenzie Towne, Copperfield, New Brighton, Cranston and Auburn Bay were still filling in when the writs were issued. Fish Creek Provincial Park, a protected valley running east to the Bow, cuts through the middle of it.

Candidates

Jason Kenney (Conservative) — Born in Oakville, Ontario in 1968, Kenney left a philosophy programme at the University of San Francisco without a degree, took charge of the newly formed Alberta Taxpayers Association as its first executive director in 1989, moved up to the presidency of its national successor, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the following year, and won Calgary Southeast for Reform in 1997 at twenty-nine. He was parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister from February 2006 and was sworn to the Privy Council on 4 January 2007 as Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity. The job made him the government's standing representative at community events, ethnic media outlets and religious festivals across the country, and it was central to Conservative efforts to win over immigrant voters. He was the sitting member.

Margaret Chandler (Green Party) — An environmental communications consultant in Calgary, Chandler ran for the Greens.

Brad Carroll (Liberal) — An education analyst living in Calgary, Carroll carried the Liberal nomination.

Chris Willott (NDP) — A quality assurance analyst, Willott stood for the New Democrats.

About the Riding

The southeast was Calgary's fastest-growing quadrant through the 2000s, and this riding absorbed most of that growth, reaching 125,738 residents by the 2006 census. Its older communities — Acadia, Willow Park, Lake Bonavista, Midnapore — were built between the 1960s and the 1980s, several of them around artificial lakes held privately by community associations, an arrangement that shaped both property values and neighbourhood identity. South and east of them, developers were laying out McKenzie Towne, Cranston, Auburn Bay, Copperfield and New Brighton at a pace that put thousands of new households a year inside the riding's boundaries.

Household incomes ran well above the national average. A large share of residents worked as engineers, geologists, landmen, accountants and managers in the downtown energy offices, commuting north on Deerfoot Trail or Macleod Trail; the retail and service corridors along Macleod and 130 Avenue SE supplied most of the local employment. Home ownership rates were among the highest in the city, and the housing stock was almost entirely detached and recent.

Local concerns in 2008 were the standard ones of new suburbs, sharpened by the speed of construction: schools opening years after the families arrived, recreation centres and libraries that did not exist, and a southeast LRT line that had been on Calgary's transportation plan for decades without a single rail being laid. Deerfoot congestion was a daily grievance. Federally, the argument was the Liberal carbon tax proposal, which Conservative campaigns across Alberta treated as the defining issue of the election, and — from the third week of September — the financial crisis and the slide in crude prices, which raised the first serious doubts in years about the durability of Calgary's boom.