Lethbridge, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Lethbridge

Coulees cut through the middle of the city at the centre of this riding, where the Oldman River divides Lethbridge into west side and old town and the high level railway bridge crosses the valley. Alberta's fourth-largest city and the commercial capital of the province's southern quarter, Lethbridge anchored a district that reached well beyond it: the surrounding county and its towns — Coaldale, Coalhurst, Picture Butte, Nobleford — and then south across the County of Warner and into Cardston County as far as the Montana line, taking in Magrath, Raymond, Stirling and Milk River.

Candidates

Rick Casson (Conservative) — Born at Calgary in 1948, Casson spent nearly three decades as manager of printing services at the University of Lethbridge. He lived at Picture Butte, where he sat on council from 1977 and served as mayor from 1986 to 1995, and had held the federal seat since 1997, first for Reform and then through the Alliance and Conservative years. In May 2006 he became chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence, putting him at the centre of Parliament's scrutiny of the Afghanistan mission.

Mark Sandilands (NDP) — A psychologist, Sandilands came to the University of Lethbridge in 1968, a year after it opened, and taught in its psychology department for thirty-two years before retiring in 2000. He had led the university's faculty association and the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations, and had carried the New Democrat banner provincially in Lethbridge West in 2001 and 2004.

Michael Joseph Cormican (Liberal) — Cormican was a retired psychiatric nurse living in Lethbridge, carrying the Liberal banner in a region where the party had not been competitive for a generation.

Amanda Swagar (Green Party) — Swagar was a student in Lethbridge, running for a party whose campaign leaned on climate policy and on its push for inclusion in the leaders' debates.

Geoffrey Capp (Christian Heritage Party) — Capp worked as a security guard in Lethbridge and stood for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Lethbridge began as a coal town in the 1880s and reinvented itself as the service centre for one of Canada's most intensively farmed regions. Irrigation drawn from the Oldman River and the St. Mary project turned the semi-arid plain into land supporting sugar beets, potatoes, corn, dry beans and other specialty crops, which in turn supported food processing plants and one of the densest concentrations of cattle feedlots in the country. Grain, oilseed and ranching filled the drier ground beyond the irrigation districts.

The city itself leaned on public institutions. The University of Lethbridge, the province's only university south of Calgary, and Lethbridge College trained much of the region's workforce and employed a large share of it, while Chinook Regional Hospital served as the referral centre for the south. Nine of the ten largest employers in the city were public bodies, giving Lethbridge a steadier profile than places tied directly to drilling.

Two agricultural files sat squarely in front of voters in the autumn of 2008. The United States brought its mandatory country-of-origin labelling requirements into force on 30 September, two weeks before election day, and Canadian producers warned that American packers would stop buying Canadian cattle and hogs rather than segregate them. Feeders around Lethbridge, already squeezed by a high dollar and expensive feed grain, had a direct stake in whether Ottawa could get the rules changed. The second was the Canadian Wheat Board: the government had tried to strip barley out of the single desk by regulation and lost in the Federal Court, leaving the question open and farmers in the district divided.

Otherwise the campaign turned on the same subjects as the rest of the country: the economy after a month of financial upheaval, the Liberal carbon tax proposal, and the Afghanistan deployment, on which the sitting member had a committee record to defend. Growth showed too, as west side subdivisions expanded and raised questions about schools, hospital capacity and housing costs.