Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton—Sherwood Park

Straddling the eastern edge of the Alberta capital, this constituency joined a wedge of northeast Edmonton to the much larger suburban population of Strathcona County. Its territory of roughly 306 square kilometres took in Sherwood Park, the county's urban service area, and the city of Fort Saskatchewan downstream on the North Saskatchewan River. Drawn in the 2003 redistribution, the seat entered the 2008 campaign with no sitting member on the ballot.

Candidates

Tim Uppal (Conservative) — Uppal was born at New Westminster, British Columbia in November 1974 and grew up in Edmonton. Between 1992 and 1997 he was executive producer and host of a program on CKER, Edmonton's multilingual radio station, and from 2004 he managed residential mortgages at TD Canada Trust. He founded and led the South Edmonton Youth Group, sat on a Capital Health community health council from 2001, and was active in the Sherwood Park Chamber of Commerce and the local Rotary Club. He had stood federally twice before, for the Canadian Alliance in Edmonton Southeast in 2000 and for the Conservatives in Edmonton—Beaumont in 2004, losing both times to Liberal MP David Kilgour.

James Ford (Independent) — A business consultant living in Sherwood Park, Ford had long worked inside Progressive Conservative and Conservative organizations provincially and federally. He stood outside the party after objecting to the way the Conservative nomination in the riding had been run, and said that if elected he would almost certainly vote with the Conservatives and expected to seek a place in their caucus.

Brian LaBelle (NDP) — LaBelle was a child and youth care worker from Edmonton, carrying the New Democrat banner in a suburban seat where the party's base sat largely in the riding's city neighbourhoods.

Rick Szostak (Liberal) — Szostak had taught economics at the University of Alberta since 1985, after a bachelor's degree at McGill and a doctorate at Northwestern. He published on economic history and on the methods of interdisciplinary research.

Nina Erfani (Green Party) — Erfani was a university instructor living in Edmonton.

About the Riding

The seat came open because Ken Epp, a former mathematics instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology who had sat since 1993 — for Elk Island until the 2003 redistribution and for this seat afterwards — had said in 2006 that he would not run again. The fight to succeed him became the defining story of the riding in 2008. Local Conservatives argued that it had been settled with the party leadership's involvement rather than by the membership, and that the winner came from Edmonton rather than from the Park; the objection carried through the writ period as Ford's independent run. Epp stayed neutral. It was an unusual spectacle in a province where Conservative nominations were normally the whole contest.

Economically the riding was tied to hydrocarbon processing. The plants along the western side of Sherwood Park — among them Imperial Oil's Strathcona refinery and Petro-Canada's Edmonton refinery — sat at the southern end of Alberta's Industrial Heartland, the joint industrial land-use area created in 1998 by Strathcona County with Fort Saskatchewan, Sturgeon County and Lamont County; Shell's Scotford complex anchored the northern end near Fort Saskatchewan. Through the mid-2000s the Heartland was positioned as the province's preferred location for upgrading oil sands bitumen, and the queue of proposed upgraders drove land assembly, engineering work and competition for trades.

That base paid well, and household incomes in Strathcona County ran well above the Alberta average. Most residents commuted into Edmonton, making road capacity a standing grievance: the Sherwood Park Freeway, Baseline Road and the unbuilt eastern leg of Anthony Henday Drive were regular subjects of municipal lobbying. Autumn sharpened the mood. Crude prices that peaked in July fell steeply through September and October, and the credit crisis raised doubts about whether the announced upgraders would be built at all, on top of the ordinary suburban pressures of schools, health services and housing costs.