Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont

Mill Woods was Edmonton's first large planned suburb. The city began assembling the land in 1970, and the development concept approved the following spring set out eight communities around a central town centre, built on curving streets and small lots rather than the grid that had governed Edmonton until then. The riding wrapped that community together with the newer Ellerslie and Meadows districts, the sliver of Leduc County between the city and Beaumont, and the town of Beaumont itself — about 175 square kilometres in all.

Candidates

Mike Lake (Conservative) — Lake won this seat in 2006 in his first run for office, after taking a crowded Conservative nomination and following the retirement of the Liberal member, David Kilgour. Born in New Westminster in 1969 and raised in Devon, Alberta, he earned a commerce degree at the University of Alberta and worked for the Edmonton Oilers organisation, rising to director of ticket sales. He sought a second term as a government backbencher.

Indira Saroya (Liberal) — Saroya ran a day care in Edmonton and campaigned in a riding where immigration and settlement questions carried more weight than in most Alberta seats.

Mike Butler (NDP) — Butler worked in construction and was making his second campaign of 2008: he had carried the Alberta NDP's banner in Edmonton-Rutherford at the provincial election in March before standing federally here seven months later.

David Allan Hrushka (Green) — Self-employed and living in Edmonton, Hrushka stood for the Greens, who fielded a candidate in every one of Alberta's twenty-eight ridings.

Naomi Rankin, a computer programmer who had led the Communist Party's Alberta organisation since 1992 and had been a candidate in Edmonton constituencies since 1982, also appeared on the ballot.

About the Riding

Mill Woods was laid out in sectors, each subdivided into neighbourhoods carrying Cree and other Indigenous names — Tipaskan, Kameyosek, Satoo, Ekota, Menisa, Tawa, Meyokumin, Sakaw — and its comparatively cheap housing drew successive waves of newcomers from Punjab, the Philippines, East Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America from the mid-1970s onward. By 2008 the area was the most diverse part of Edmonton, with Punjabi-language instruction in local schools, cricket pitches in the parks and an annual Nagar Kirtan procession through the streets. Mill Woods Town Centre served as the commercial and civic anchor, with the Grey Nuns Community Hospital and the Edmonton Police Service's southeast division headquarters nearby.

Work for residents came from the industrial and warehousing districts of south-east Edmonton, from health care, from retail, and from the construction trades feeding both the city's building boom and the oil sands service chain. Households in the riding were younger than the national average and more likely to include children.

Beaumont, settled by French-speaking farming families in the 1890s and named for the hill on which its Roman Catholic church stands, had become one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the Edmonton region; it had counted 8,961 residents at the 2006 census and was climbing toward ten thousand. Its bilingual character remained evident in the schools, the signage and the town's architecture. Ellerslie and the Meadows were adding subdivisions at a similar pace. That growth generated the riding's most persistent local complaints in 2008: schools running at capacity, waits at the Grey Nuns emergency department, congestion on the roads feeding Highway 2, and housing costs that had climbed sharply during Alberta's boom before flattening as credit tightened in the campaign's final weeks.