Burnaby—Douglas, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Burnaby—Douglas

Everything in Burnaby north of a line following Kingsway and then Sperling Avenue up to the Trans-Canada Highway belonged to this constituency — 58 square kilometres running from Burrard Inlet and the Chevron refinery on the waterfront, up over Burnaby Mountain with Simon Fraser University at its summit, and down through Brentwood, Willingdon Heights, Deer Lake and Capitol Hill to the Vancouver boundary at Boundary Road. Burnaby as a whole counted about 202,000 people at the 2006 census, just over half of them born outside Canada.

Candidates

Bill Siksay (NDP) — Born in Oshawa in 1955, Siksay took his bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto and then trained for ministry at the Vancouver School of Theology without finishing. He spent eighteen years as constituency assistant to Svend Robinson, ran unsuccessfully in Vancouver Centre in 1997, and won Burnaby—Douglas himself in 2004 after Robinson stepped down. Re-elected narrowly in 2006, he had held the New Democrats' citizenship and immigration file and by the end of the 39th Parliament was carrying Canadian heritage and housing — a portfolio that put him at the centre of the autumn's argument over cuts to arts and culture programs.

Ronald Leung (Conservative) — Leung had come to Canada from Hong Kong in the early 1980s and had lived in the Burnaby area for about twenty-five years. He built a public profile as a Chinese-language radio broadcaster and current-affairs host and was a familiar figure in local community organisations. He ran for Vancouver city council with the Non-Partisan Association in 2005, and by 2008 was working as a political aide in the office of the federal citizenship and immigration minister.

Bill Cunningham (Liberal) — Cunningham had served as president of the party's British Columbia wing. This was his third consecutive campaign in the riding against Siksay, having also carried the Liberal nomination in 2004 and 2006.

Doug Perry (Green) — Perry was self-employed and had stood for the Greens in Vancouver South at the previous general election.

George Gidora, a bus driver from Coquitlam who led the Communist Party of British Columbia, also stood.

About the Riding

Simon Fraser University was the riding's largest institution and, with the UniverCity residential community taking shape beside it, an increasingly permanent one. Down the mountain, Brentwood was in the early stages of turning from a low-rise shopping district into a SkyTrain-served tower node, and the Millennium Line had reoriented development across the northern half of the city.

The waterfront told a different story. Chevron's Burnaby refinery stood on Burrard Inlet, and below the mountain sat the Westridge Marine Terminal, the salt-water end of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta. On 24 July 2007 a contractor's excavator digging a storm sewer trench along Inlet Drive struck the buried line, and crude sprayed into the air for about twenty-five minutes before the pipeline could be isolated; fifty homes and properties were affected, eleven houses were sprayed with oil, and roughly 250 residents left their homes. Cleanup, liability and pipeline safety were still unresolved when the writ dropped fourteen months later.

Immigration policy was the other file with unusual weight here. Changes carried in the 2008 budget bill gave the minister new authority to cap, refuse and set processing priorities for applications in order to work down a backlog approaching a million cases. In a riding where about half the residents were immigrants and family reunification waits ran to years, that was argued over on doorsteps in a way it was not in most of the country.

The seat had elected New Democrats continuously since 1979 under its various names, first Robinson and then Siksay. The Conservatives judged it winnable and put real organisation behind Leung, betting that support among Chinese-Canadian voters in north Burnaby could overturn a majority that had already narrowed in 2006.