Calgary West, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Calgary West

Calgary West covered the western edge of the city on both banks of the Bow. North of the river it took in Montgomery and Bowness, the Varsity district and the University of Calgary campus, and ran out to Silver Springs, Scenic Acres, Valley Ridge and the new streets of Tuscany at the city limit. South of the river it climbed the escarpment through Wildwood, Patterson, Coach Hill, Christie Park and Strathcona Park and continued west into Signal Hill, Discovery Ridge, Cougar Ridge, Springbank Hill, West Springs and Aspen Woods, the last of which was still being built out when the campaign began.

Candidates

Rob Anders (Conservative) — Anders had held the seat since 1997, winning the Reform nomination after Stephen Harper left the Commons and taking the riding at twenty-five, among the youngest members returned that year. He came into the 2008 campaign after a contested renomination. Eleven local Conservative members took his 2006 acclamation to court; in March 2007 a Court of Queen's Bench judge found the party had not followed its own rules, set the acclamation aside and ordered a fresh nomination meeting; at that meeting in June 2007 Anders was acclaimed again. The party's appeal of the ruling was later allowed. He sat on the government back bench, and in 2001 had been the only member of the Commons to refuse consent to a motion granting Nelson Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship.

Jennifer Pollock (Liberal) — A Calgary lawyer, Pollock had served three terms as a trustee on the Calgary Board of Education during the 1990s before turning to federal politics.

Randy Weeks (Green) — Weeks worked as an auditor in Calgary and ran on the Green platform's proposal to shift taxation off income and onto pollution, an argument with limited purchase in a city built on oil and gas.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff (NDP) — A University of Calgary undergraduate finishing a double degree in political science and international relations, Phelps Bondaroff was making his second federal run in the riding after standing in 2006. He had also carried the Alberta NDP banner in Calgary-Bow at the provincial election in March.

Kirk Schmidt (Independent) — An information technology analyst, Schmidt mounted the first independent candidacy against Anders, arguing that a member without a party could answer to constituents alone.

André Vachon, a pipeline worker, ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Wealth in Calgary West rose as the land did. The older streets of Bowness, Montgomery and Wildwood held modest postwar housing and a mixed tenant and owner population, while the ridges to the west had been built out over the previous fifteen years with executive housing aimed at the professional class of the energy industry. Westhills Towne Centre and Signal Hill Centre anchored retail employment, and the Trans-Canada Highway carried commuters into the downtown core.

The University of Calgary sat inside the riding and gave it a student and academic population unusual among the city's suburban seats. Otherwise employment tracked the oil and gas cycle almost directly, and the boom running from 2003 to the summer of 2008 had pushed incomes, house prices and construction activity to records. The reversal that began in July arrived too late to shift many voting intentions but dominated local commentary.

The riding's more distinctive feature that autumn was friction inside the governing party. Dissatisfaction with the member among a section of the local membership had produced the court challenge of 2007, an organised effort to persuade Conservative voters to look elsewhere, and finally an independent candidacy. None of it disturbed the fundamentals of a constituency that had returned right-of-centre members without interruption since it was re-created for the 1979 election, but it made Calgary West the rare Alberta seat where the sharpest argument of the campaign was among Conservatives.