Edmonton Centre, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton Centre

Compact and densely built, this had been the most genuinely contested of Edmonton's seats for fifteen years. It covered the downtown core, the apartment towers of Oliver, and a westward band of mature neighbourhoods — Westmount, Glenora, Crestwood, Grovenor, Laurier Heights, Jasper Park — bounded by the North Saskatchewan River valley on the south and reaching north to Spruce Avenue and Prince Rupert.

Candidates

Laurie Hawn (Conservative) — Hawn joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1964 and flew for thirty years, taking his wings in 1967 and going on to the T-33 and the CF-104 before becoming one of the first Canadians to fly the CF-18. He led 416 Tactical Fighter Squadron, held the wing operations post at 4 Wing Cold Lake, and retired as a lieutenant-colonel. He lost narrowly to Anne McLellan in 2004 and beat her in 2006. On 10 October 2007 he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence, and he sat on the special Commons committee struck to examine the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, which began hearing witnesses in the spring of 2008.

Jim Wachowich (Liberal) — An Edmonton lawyer, Wachowich had built a practice and a public profile around consumer advocacy, appearing on behalf of consumer interests in regulatory and policy matters. The Liberals regarded Edmonton Centre as their best remaining prospect in Alberta and recruited accordingly.

Donna Martyn (NDP) — Martyn, an Edmonton teacher, ran for the New Democrats, who argued through the campaign that they rather than the Liberals were the credible alternative in the city's most urban seat.

David James Parker (Green) — Parker, a professional engineer, led the Alberta Greens from 1996 to 2001 and had already contested Edmonton Centre federally in 2004. He brought the province's longest Green organising record to the race.

Peggy Morton, a journalist, ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Oliver was among the densest residential districts in Alberta, its mid-rise and high-rise blocks filled with renters, students and young professionals, and it gave Edmonton Centre a tenant population unlike anywhere else in the province. West of it, Glenora and Crestwood offered large houses on treed lots and housed much of the city's legal, medical and business establishment. The contrast between the two produced a constituency that could swing.

Employment was concentrated in government, health care, education and professional services rather than resource extraction. The Alberta Legislature and the departmental offices around it, the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Grant MacEwan College's downtown campus and the law and accounting firms along Jasper Avenue supplied the bulk of the riding's jobs. Downtown revitalisation was a standing preoccupation: the Art Gallery of Alberta, closed to the public in 2007, was being rebuilt on Churchill Square, and arguments over office vacancy, street-level retail and the future of the city-centre airport recurred through the decade.

The seat's political history explained the attention it drew. Anne McLellan held it and its predecessors for the Liberals from 1993 to 2006, several of those contests decided narrowly, and her defeat removed the last Liberal cabinet presence in Alberta. Going into October 2008 the Liberals were trying to win it back while the New Democrats argued they were the better placed challenger. The federal government's August 2008 reductions to arts and culture programs gave opposition candidates a local argument in a riding containing the Citadel Theatre, the Winspear Centre and much of Edmonton's professional arts sector, while Conservatives pressed the case against the Liberal carbon-pricing proposal and pointed to the Afghanistan file and the parliamentary secretary's part in it.