Red Deer, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Red Deer

Midway along the Calgary–Edmonton corridor, Red Deer had grown from a service town into Alberta's third-largest city, and the riding built around it took in the city plus adjoining parts of Red Deer County, reaching out to Innisfail, Penhold, Springbrook, Sylvan Lake and Delburne. The Red Deer River loops through the middle of the city, and Highway 2 runs past its western edge carrying the traffic between the two metropolitan centres. At the 2006 census the city counted 82,772 residents, up from 67,707 five years earlier.

Candidates

Earl Dreeshen (Conservative) — A fourth-generation farmer on land near Pine Lake in Red Deer County, Dreeshen was born at Red Deer in 1953 and trained as a teacher, holding a Bachelor of Education. He spent thirty-four years teaching mathematics and science at Innisfail High School, retiring in June 2008 before seeking the Conservative nomination. He came to the campaign with a long record in local agricultural and school community life rather than in partisan politics.

Stuart Somerville (NDP) — Somerville was a teacher from Endiang, a hamlet on the dry country east of Red Deer, and ran for the New Democrats in a city where the party's organization was small.

Evan Bedford (Green Party) — An engineering technologist living in Red Deer, Bedford ran on a platform centred on carbon pricing in a riding whose livelihood came largely from hydrocarbons.

Garfield Marks (Liberal) — Marks worked as an oilfield supervisor in Red Deer and carried the Liberal banner in a constituency where his party's proposed carbon tax was a difficult sell among his own colleagues in the patch.

About the Riding

The seat was open for the first time in fifteen years. Bob Mills, who had represented Red Deer since 1993 through the Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative periods and had chaired the Commons environment and sustainable development committee, announced he would not run again, leaving the Conservative nomination as the decisive contest in a district that had not elected anyone else in living memory.

Its position in the middle of the corridor made Red Deer the distribution, retail and medical centre for central Alberta. Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre handled referrals from a wide catchment, Red Deer College provided trades training and university transfer programs, and Westerner Park hosted agricultural exhibitions and trade shows drawing from across the province.

Industry rested on hydrocarbons. The oilfield service sector — drilling and completion contractors, pipe yards, fabrication shops and trucking firms — worked the conventional fields of central Alberta and shipped crews north to the oil sands, and it set the tone of the local labour market. Twenty kilometres east along Highway 11, past the riding's boundary in Lacombe County, NOVA Chemicals' Joffre site — three ethylene units and two polyethylene plants on roughly 900 acres — drew a share of its workforce out of the city each shift. Mixed farming, cattle and grain kept agriculture a significant employer in the surrounding county.

The city's population was noticeably young, a consequence of the trades workforce that the boom of 2003 to 2008 had drawn in, and that in turn drove demand for housing, schools and recreation infrastructure faster than the tax base could easily cover. Rental vacancy had been tight and house prices had climbed steeply.

Those conditions changed during the campaign. Natural gas prices, which mattered more to central Alberta drilling than oil did, had been weak through 2008, and the financial crisis of September and October raised the prospect of a broader slowdown. Local debate turned on what a downturn would mean for service company employment and for petrochemicals, and the Liberal carbon tax proposal was argued in the same terms, its opponents casting it as a levy on the fuels the district produced. Farmers in Red Deer County followed the unresolved fight over the Canadian Wheat Board's single-desk marketing of barley.