Wetaskiwin, AB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Wetaskiwin

Central Alberta between Edmonton and Red Deer formed the body of this riding, which reached from Leduc County in the north down through the County of Wetaskiwin and Ponoka County to Lacombe County, then west into part of Clearwater County and the foothills as far as Rocky Mountain House. Just over 15,000 square kilometres of farmland, the Queen Elizabeth II Highway corridor and three settled market towns gave it a prosperous character quite unlike Alberta's frontier ridings.

Candidates

Blaine Calkins (Conservative) — Calkins grew up around Lacombe and took a science degree in zoology at the University of Alberta in 1992. He spent the middle 1990s as a ranger in Alberta's provincial parks, including a posting in charge of Red Lodge Provincial Park, worked as a computer technician, and from 2000 taught in the information technology programs at Red Deer College. He served a term on Lacombe town council and won the federal seat in 2006 on the retirement of Dale Johnston, who had held it since 1993.

Tim Robson (NDP) — Robson sold life insurance in the city of Wetaskiwin, where he had built up his own agency, and described himself plainly as a socialist who admired Tommy Douglas and the public health system Douglas had established. This was his second run at the seat, having also carried the New Democrat nomination in 2004.

Les Parsons (Green) — Parsons coached cross-country skiing and lived in Lacombe. He stood for the Greens in a constituency where farm and energy incomes were the dominant economic facts.

Rita Katherine Dillon (Liberal) — Dillon was a social worker in private clinical practice, living at Winfield in the western part of the riding.

Shawn Mann of Rimbey, an operations manager, ran for the Canadian Action Party.

About the Riding

The city of Wetaskiwin held roughly 11,000 people and had built a regional identity around vehicle and farm equipment sales, its dealership strip drawing buyers from well beyond the county. On the city's edge stood the Reynolds-Alberta Museum, a provincial collection of agricultural, industrial and transportation machinery that also housed Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame. Lacombe, a town of similar size at the southern end of the riding, was home to a federal agricultural research station operated by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, one of the oldest in the West and the origin of the Lacombe hog. Ponoka, roughly 6,000 people, had its summer stampede and the provincial mental health hospital that had operated there since 1911. At the far western end, Rocky Mountain House served the ranching and gas country along the North Saskatchewan.

South of Wetaskiwin lay Hobbema, the four Cree nations of Samson, Ermineskin, Louis Bull and Montana. Oil and gas royalties held in trust by the federal Crown, band governance, housing and — during 2008 in particular — youth violence and the level of RCMP resourcing on reserve had drawn national attention to the community and made federal policy toward it a live subject in the riding.

Farming across the rest of the constituency was mixed: grain, canola, cattle and hogs, with a hog sector in serious difficulty through 2007 and 2008 as feed costs climbed and the Canadian dollar's rise cut into export returns. Conventional oil and gas provided the other half of the rural economy, and gas prices had fallen hard by the autumn. The QE II corridor supported trucking, warehousing and commuting toward both Edmonton and Red Deer.

Right-of-centre parties had held Wetaskiwin without interruption since 1993, and the seat had gone Progressive Conservative continuously for the thirty-five years before that. The arguments that carried here were about farm income, energy taxation and the security of savings as the financial crisis broke.