Westlock—St. Paul, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Westlock—St. Paul

Few Alberta constituencies covered as much varied ground as this one. From Sturgeon County on Edmonton's northern doorstep it ran northeast through Westlock, Thorhild and Smoky Lake, past Saddle Lake and St. Paul, and out through the Municipal District of Bonnyville to Cold Lake and the Saskatchewan border — nearly 23,000 square kilometres of farmland giving way to boreal forest, lakes and oil sands leases, with the North Saskatchewan River forming much of its southern edge.

Candidates

Brian Storseth (Conservative) — Born in Barrhead in February 1978, Storseth took political science at the University of Alberta, working in the office of the Speaker of the provincial legislature while he studied. He was elected to Barrhead town council in his early twenties, then moved to St. Paul and ran an insurance agency there. He won the seat in 2006 after the retirement of David Chatters, and in his first Parliament sat on the Commons committees for Aboriginal affairs and for agriculture.

Della Drury (NDP) — Drury lived in Edmonton and had a background in forest technology. She stood for the New Democrats in a riding where the party's best hope was second place.

Leila Houle (Liberal) — Houle was a business owner from Goodfish Lake, on the Whitefish Lake First Nation. Born in St. Paul, she went to high school at Vilna, where she was students' union president, studied communications at Grant MacEwan and took a degree in Native studies and anthropology at the University of Alberta, where she led the Aboriginal Students Union.

Aden Murphy (Green) — A student living in Edmonton, Murphy carried the Green Party banner across a constituency whose economy was built on oil, gas and timber.

Sip Hofstede, a self-employed draftsman from Westlock, ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

The riding's eastern end sat on top of the Cold Lake oil sands, the second-largest bitumen deposit in Alberta after the Athabasca. Imperial Oil's Cold Lake operation and Canadian Natural's Primrose project used cyclic steam injection rather than mining, and through 2007 and 2008 the region absorbed the labour shortages, housing pressure and camp construction that came with sustained high oil prices. Bonnyville and Cold Lake had the boom-town problems that went with it: rents, road maintenance, hospitals and schools running behind population growth.

Cold Lake also carried 4 Wing, the air force's largest fighter base, home to CF-18 squadrons and the sprawling Air Weapons Range straddling the Alberta–Saskatchewan boundary. Military procurement and base funding mattered here in a way they did not in most of the province.

West of that, the character changed. Westlock, Smoky Lake, Thorhild and Sturgeon counties were mixed farming country — grain, canola, cattle — with forestry taking over toward the north. Sturgeon County formed part of Alberta's Industrial Heartland, the petrochemical and upgrading complex northeast of Edmonton, and Agrium's Redwater plant was among the largest nitrogen fertilizer operations in the country. Fertilizer prices had risen sharply that year, squeezing farm margins just as grain prices began to fall back.

The riding contained a substantial Indigenous population, including Saddle Lake Cree Nation, Whitefish Lake, Kehewin, Frog Lake and the Cold Lake First Nations, together with Métis settlements in the northeast. Housing, water systems, on-reserve schooling and the availability of health care at a distance from Edmonton were persistent federal files.

Politically the seat had been safe for the right since 1993 under every party name the movement had used. It was created in the 2003 redistribution, carried the name Battle River from 2004 to 2005, then reverted to Westlock—St. Paul. With no single urban base, campaigning meant working a string of small centres — Redwater, Gibbons, Legal, Morinville, Waskatenau, Smoky Lake, Elk Point, Glendon, Bonnyville, Cold Lake.