Edmonton—Spruce Grove, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton—Spruce Grove

West of Edmonton, the Yellowhead corridor runs out of the city past acreages and industrial yards toward a cluster of fast-growing towns, and this riding followed it. The district combined west-end Edmonton neighbourhoods with the City of Spruce Grove, the Town of Stony Plain and a portion of Parkland County, covering just over a thousand square kilometres in all. It was new for the 2004 election and had returned the same member ever since.

Candidates

Rona Ambrose (Conservative) — Born in Valleyview in 1969, Ambrose took a bachelor's degree at the University of Victoria and a master's in political science at the University of Alberta before advising the Government of Alberta on communications and public policy. She was first elected in 2004 and entered cabinet in February 2006 as Minister of the Environment, introducing the government's Clean Air Act that October. On 4 January 2007 she became President of the Queen's Privy Council, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and Minister of Western Economic Diversification, the portfolios she still held when Parliament was dissolved in September 2008.

Barb Phillips (NDP) — Phillips was a support worker living in Spruce Grove, standing for the New Democrats in a riding where the party's organization was thin outside the Edmonton portion.

Chris Austin (Liberal) — An information technologist from Spruce Grove, Austin carried the Liberal banner in a district that had given the party little purchase since its creation.

Wendy Walker (Green Party) — Walker was an Edmonton business owner, running on the Greens' carbon pricing platform in a province where that message met heavy resistance.

About the Riding

The eastern end was ordinary west Edmonton: postwar and later subdivisions, arterial retail and commuter traffic feeding onto the Yellowhead. The western half formed the core of what local governments called the Tri-Municipal Region. Spruce Grove had counted 19,496 residents at the 2006 census, up from 15,983 five years earlier, and Stony Plain 12,363, up from 9,589, as buyers priced out of Edmonton moved west along Highway 16 and Highway 16A. The growth brought the familiar strains of quick suburban expansion: school capacity, water and wastewater servicing, recreation facilities and a road network built for a smaller population.

Work was split between the capital and the corridor. Many residents commuted into Edmonton for jobs in government, health care and the trades. Closer to home, the Acheson industrial area in Parkland County — on Highway 60 between Highway 16A and Highway 16, immediately west of Edmonton's boundary — had grown into a substantial employment node of oilfield service firms, transport and logistics yards, fabrication shops and warehousing on land cheaper than the city could offer. Farther out, Parkland County remained mixed farming country, its grain and cattle operations increasingly interspersed with country residential subdivisions.

Ambrose's portfolios gave the riding an unusual profile for a suburban seat. Western Economic Diversification put her in charge of the federal development agency for the four western provinces, while intergovernmental affairs kept her in negotiations with the provinces over transfers and the fiscal imbalance question that had preoccupied Ottawa since 2006.

Heading into October 2008 the local conversation was dominated by the economy. Five years of expansion driven by high oil and gas prices had produced labour shortages, construction cost inflation and steep house price increases across the Edmonton region, and the financial turmoil of September unsettled that picture. The Liberal carbon tax proposal was a live argument in the riding given how much of the local workforce depended on energy and energy services, and farmers in Parkland County followed the government's push to end the Canadian Wheat Board's single-desk marketing of barley — a dispute that had run through a producer plebiscite in 2007, been struck down in the Federal Court, and remained unsettled.