Edmonton—Leduc, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton—Leduc

Highway 2 was the spine of this riding. From Edmonton's affluent south-west — Riverbend, Terwillegar, Brander Gardens, Rhatigan Ridge — the corridor ran south past the Nisku industrial park and the international airport to Leduc, with the town of Devon sitting off to the west on the North Saskatchewan. At 421 square kilometres it mixed established urban neighbourhoods with fast-growing towns and one of the largest industrial districts in the country.

Candidates

James Rajotte (Conservative) — Rajotte was first elected in 2000 for Edmonton Southwest and had represented Edmonton—Leduc since the 2004 redistribution. Born in 1970, he read social sciences at the University of Ottawa and took a second undergraduate degree, in arts, at the University of Alberta. Through the Parliament that ended in September he chaired the Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, and the Commons had adopted his private member's bill on identity theft. He was seeking a fourth term.

Donna Lynn Smith (Liberal) — Smith taught in the University of Alberta's faculty of nursing, where her courses covered health system leadership, program planning, continuity of care and gerontological nursing. Her campaign emphasised health care delivery and the strains an ageing population would put on it.

Hana Razga (NDP) — Born in London to Czechoslovak parents and settled in Canada from 1968, Razga spent her career in human resources with the federal public service. She volunteered with an Alberta women's shelter, Big Sisters and MATCH International, and had already run three times provincially and once federally for the New Democrats.

Valerie Kennedy (Green) — Kennedy worked in movement education in Edmonton and stood for the Greens on a platform of ecological tax reform and transit expansion in the Highway 2 corridor.

About the Riding

The Edmonton portion of the constituency was built largely from the late 1970s onward on the tablelands above Whitemud Creek, and by 2008 Riverbend and Terwillegar Towne were among the city's more expensive districts, occupied by professionals and managers who drove or bused downtown. Their concerns — commuting times, school construction lagging behind subdivision approvals, property taxes — differed sharply from those of the riding's southern half.

Nisku, sitting between Edmonton and Leduc, was the economic engine. Hundreds of firms in the business park built pressure vessels, drilling equipment, pipeline components, modular camps and heavy trucks for the oil sands and the conventional patch, and the district ranked among the largest energy manufacturing parks in North America. The Edmonton International Airport adjoined it, employed several thousand people, and had begun planning the terminal expansion it would carry out over the following years. Devon owed its existence to the Leduc No. 1 discovery well of February 1947, drilled a short distance away, and the site was preserved as an interpretive centre.

Leduc itself, with 16,967 residents at the 2006 census, had grown quickly as families priced out of Edmonton moved south while remaining within reach of Nisku and airport employment. Every part of that economy depended on the price of oil, which had fallen by more than a third from its July peak by the time voters went to the polls. Fabrication shops that had spent two years unable to hire enough welders were beginning to talk about order books instead of labour shortages, and the carbon-pricing proposal at the centre of the Liberal platform found little sympathy along a highway lined with energy service companies.