Edmonton—Strathcona, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Edmonton—Strathcona

Compact by Alberta standards, Edmonton—Strathcona covered the older residential grid south and east of the North Saskatchewan River, running from the river valley south to Whitemud Drive, east to the city limits and west to Whitemud Creek. Its boundaries enclosed Garneau, McKernan, Belgravia, Windsor Park, Queen Alexandra, Ritchie, Strathcona, Bonnie Doon, King Edward Park, Pleasantview, Malmo Plains, Holyrood, Ottewell, Capilano and Gold Bar, among others. Within them stood the University of Alberta, its francophone Campus Saint-Jean, the Walter C. Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre and the Old Strathcona commercial district.

Candidates

Linda Duncan (NDP) — Duncan took her law degree at the University of Alberta and, rather than join a firm, founded the Environmental Law Centre in Edmonton in 1982 and ran it. In 1987 Ottawa recruited her to build an enforcement unit at Environment Canada; she then served as an assistant deputy minister for renewable resources in the Yukon government, and later led the law and enforcement branch of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal, the trilateral body created under NAFTA. World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects took her to Jamaica, Indonesia and Bangladesh to build enforcement programs. She earned a master's degree in law at Dalhousie and taught environmental law there, returned to Edmonton in 1999, and sat on the board of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund. She had contested this riding in 2006.

Rahim Jaffer (Conservative) — Jaffer had represented the riding since 1997, winning it first for Reform and holding it through the Canadian Alliance and Conservative eras. In February 2006 Stephen Harper named him chair of the national Conservative caucus, a position he still held when the writ dropped. He campaigned on the government's record and on the value to the riding of a seat inside the governing caucus.

Claudette Roy (Liberal) — Roy was an educator and a leading figure in Franco-Albertan affairs, appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in November 2000. Her citation credits her with launching Alberta's first publicly funded French school and with serving on the task force whose recommendations produced the province's francophone school boards. Campus Saint-Jean, the province's centre of French-language post-secondary education, sat inside the riding she was contesting.

Jane Thrall (Green Party) — Thrall was an optometrist practising in Edmonton, running in a riding where the Green platform found more receptive ground than almost anywhere else in Alberta.

Kevan Hunter, a teacher, ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

The university dominated the riding's character. Tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff gave the district a younger, more transient and better educated population than any other in Alberta, and the surrounding streets filled with rental housing, walk-up apartments and converted older homes. Whyte Avenue through Old Strathcona was the city's main entertainment and independent retail street and hosted the Fringe Theatre Festival each August. Bonnie Doon anchored the francophone community around Campus Saint-Jean and La Cité francophone. Health care and education, not oil and gas, were the largest local employers.

Politically the riding had been the province's persistent exception. Alberta had returned an entirely Conservative slate in 2006, but the margin here had been narrowing over successive elections as the New Democrats consolidated support in the neighbourhoods closest to the campus. The Conservative vote was concentrated in the quieter, owner-occupied areas to the south and east, in Capilano, Ottewell and Gold Bar. With three parties competing for the same non-Conservative electorate, the arithmetic of vote splitting was a standing subject of argument through the campaign.

Issues tracked that makeup. Post-secondary funding, student debt and research support mattered in a district built around a university, and the shortage of affordable rental housing had become acute after years of provincial boom. Environmental policy carried unusual weight: the Liberal carbon tax proposal, oil sands regulation and Canada's abandoned Kyoto targets were argued seriously in a place where the energy industry employed neighbours rather than most voters. The south LRT extension was then under construction through McKernan and Belgravia toward Southgate.