Medicine Hat, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Medicine Hat

Alberta's southeastern corner formed a single constituency, running from the South Saskatchewan valley at Medicine Hat across the dry mixed-grass prairie to the Saskatchewan boundary and north to the irrigated country around Brooks. The riding took in Redcliff, Cypress County, Bow Island and Foremost in the County of Forty Mile, Taber and its municipal district, the County of Newell and the southern Special Areas around Jenner and Empress, but its population centre was the city itself, a prairie community of roughly 57,000 at the 2006 census.

Candidates

LaVar Payne (Conservative) — Born in Lethbridge in 1945, Payne spent his career in human resources management with Alberta Gas Chemicals, Novacor and Methanex, firms at the heart of Medicine Hat's petrochemical sector, and later ran his own consulting business doing career counselling work. He had been president of the Medicine Hat Conservative riding association from 2000, managed Monte Solberg's campaigns in 2004 and 2006, and worked as Solberg's special assistant.

Wally Regehr (NDP) — Regehr was a retired teacher living in Medicine Hat, carrying the New Democrat banner in a riding the party had never come close to winning.

Bev Botter (Liberal) — A retired registered nurse from Medicine Hat, Botter ran for the Liberals in a district where the party's brand had been weak since the National Energy Program.

Kevin Dodd (Green Party) — Dodd was a union worker living at Suffield, northwest of the city near the military base.

Dean Shock (Independent) — Shock was a Medicine Hat business owner running without a party label.

David S. Patrick, a contractor from Bow Island in the County of Forty Mile, also ran as an independent, and Frans Vandestroet, a farm realtor from Enchant, stood for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

The seat was open. Monte Solberg, who had held it since 1993 and had sat in cabinet since 2006, first at Citizenship and Immigration and then in the federal human resources portfolio, announced that he would leave politics rather than seek a sixth term.

The city's identity had been built on natural gas since 1883, when Canadian Pacific crews boring for water on the line west of the town struck gas instead — the first hydrocarbon find in western Canada. Medicine Hat came to own and operate its gas and electric utilities and to drill its own wells, an arrangement almost unique among Canadian municipalities that kept energy costs low, attracted industry and gave the treasury direct exposure to commodity prices. That exposure cut both ways in 2008, as gas prices spiked over the summer and then fell hard through the autumn.

Industry clustered around cheap feedstock and cheap power. The nitrogen fertilizer complex on the edge of town, the largest of its kind in the country, turned gas into ammonia and urea; carbon black and tire plants filled out the manufacturing base. The city's methanol plant, the only commercial-scale one in Canada, had stood idle since 2001 on weak methanol prices.

Outside the city, agriculture set the terms: irrigation from the South Saskatchewan and Bow supported sugar beets, potatoes and other specialty crops around Brooks and Taber, while dryland grain and cattle occupied the rest. The large beef packing plant at Brooks was among the biggest single employers in southern Alberta and had drawn a substantial immigrant workforce to a town of about 12,500. Canadian Forces Base Suffield, the country's largest military training area, lay northwest of the city and hosted a British Army armoured training unit and a federal defence research establishment.

The federal issues followed. American country-of-origin labelling rules came into force on 30 September, two weeks before the vote, threatening the cattle and hog trade that ran through the district's feedlots and packing plants. Falling gas prices raised questions about drilling employment across the southeast, water licensing in a fully allocated basin shaped what irrigation districts could plan for, and the unsettled fate of the barley monopoly divided grain growers here as elsewhere.