Vegreville—Wainwright, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Vegreville—Wainwright

This was one of the larger Alberta seats, a little over 30,000 square kilometres of east-central parkland. The Saskatchewan border closed it off on the east and the North Saskatchewan River ran along the top; from there it stretched south past the Battle River to the Provost country near the border, and west through Beaver and Leduc counties almost to the edge of Edmonton. Lamont, Two Hills, Minburn, Beaver, Vermilion River and Flagstaff counties, the Municipal District of Provost and the Alberta half of Lloydminster all sat inside it.

Candidates

Leon Benoit (Conservative) — Born at Lloydminster in 1950, Benoit farmed near Vermilion and held a science degree from the University of Alberta. He worked as a professional agrologist, spending time as a farm economist with the provincial agriculture department and later as a management consultant. He entered the Commons with the Reform breakthrough of 1993, sitting first for the old Vegreville seat, then for Lakeland from 1997, and for Vegreville—Wainwright from its creation in 2004. He chaired the Standing Committee on International Trade from May 2006 until November 2007, when he took the chair of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources — a file that put him at the centre of Commons arguments over oil sands development in the final year of the 39th Parliament.

Ray Stone (NDP) — A farmer from Innisfree, Stone stood for the New Democrats in a constituency where the party's organisation was thin.

William Munsey (Green) — Munsey worked as a train conductor for CN and lived at New Sarepta, southeast of Edmonton. He carried the Green nomination through a riding whose economy rested on the two industries — farming and fossil fuels — his party's platform most directly targeted.

Adam Campbell (Liberal) — Campbell farmed at Rosalind, southeast of Camrose, and ran for a party that had not been competitive anywhere in rural Alberta for a generation.

About the Riding

The seat was assembled in 2003 out of pieces of four others — Lakeland, Elk Island, Crowfoot and Wetaskiwin — and that patchwork origin left it without a single dominant centre. Vegreville and Wainwright each held about 5,500 residents at the 2006 census, and the rest of the population was spread across county municipalities and small towns including Tofield, Holden, Viking, Mannville, Vermilion, Two Hills, Provost and Killam.

Vegreville's largest employer was federal. Citizenship and Immigration Canada had run a case processing centre in the town since 1994, handling paperwork for applicants across the country — an unusual concentration of white-collar federal work in a prairie town of that size, and a standing argument for decentralising government jobs out of the cities. The town was also known for the aluminium pysanka erected in 1974, a marker of the Ukrainian settlement that shaped this stretch of Alberta.

Wainwright's anchor was military. CFB Wainwright hosted the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre, established in 2004 to put battle groups through full-scale rehearsals before deployment. Exercise Maple Guardian ran on the base from September to November 2008 — overlapping the campaign itself — training units bound for Afghanistan in the spring. With the mission scheduled to continue to 2011, federal defence policy was not an abstraction here.

Elsewhere the economy was grain, canola, cattle and hogs, with conventional oil and gas across the whole riding and heavy oil production and upgrading concentrated around Lloydminster. Rail branch line abandonment, farm income supports and the Canadian Wheat Board's monopoly on western wheat and barley marketing were long-running grievances. The Green Shift carbon tax plan the Liberals had released that summer found no purchase here, and the collapse in commodity prices during the final weeks of the campaign was felt directly in both the energy and farm economies.