Burnaby—New Westminster, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Burnaby—New Westminster

This seat joined pieces of two cities with quite separate histories. The Burnaby portion was everything south of Kingsway, running from the Metrotown towers — the largest concentration of shops and offices in the region outside downtown Vancouver — through Edmonds to the Big Bend flats on the Fraser. Across the boundary the riding took only the western half of New Westminster, the part lying southwest of Eighth Street: Queensborough on Lulu Island, the West End and Connaught Heights, and the downtown blocks below Columbia Street. Sapperton, Queens Park and the eastern half of the city belonged to New Westminster—Coquitlam.

Candidates

Peter Julian (NDP) — Julian was born in New Westminster in 1962 and went to school there, then worked in a refinery, in factories and in small businesses before returning as an adult student to complete a political science degree at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Work in financial administration followed, and he went on to run two organisations as executive director: the Council of Canadians, of which he was a founding member, and the Western Institute for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Elected in 2004 and returned in 2006, he was the New Democrats' international trade critic and also carried the party's file on the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympics.

Sam Rakhra (Conservative) — Rakhra lived in Burnaby and had worked in the Lower Mainland real estate industry, listing his occupation as company director.

Gerry Lenoski (Liberal) — A New Westminster resident, Lenoski gave his occupation as business person.

Carrie McLaren (Green) — McLaren worked as an accounts receivable clerk in Burnaby and carried the Green nomination.

Ismet Yetisen, a restaurant manager, ran for the Libertarian Party, and Joseph Theriault, a residential care aide from New Westminster, for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Metrotown was the reason the Burnaby end of the constituency looked the way it did. Designated a regional town centre decades earlier and served by the Expo Line, it had drawn shopping centres, office towers and rental apartments, and by 2008 the older low-rise rental stock around it was under redevelopment pressure. Edmonds and the Big Bend were more modest, mixing light industry with post-war housing along Marine Way and the Fraser foreshore.

The New Westminster end was different again. The city had been the seat of government for the mainland colony from 1859, and the streets above the river still showed it in their heritage housing; the waterfront below was slowly turning from industry to housing. Queensborough, across the north arm of the Fraser, mixed older residential blocks with riverfront industrial land. The working river remained a presence throughout — sawmills, barge traffic and rail yards along both banks — as did a chronic argument over truck movements between the port lands and the highway network, which provincial road plans under the Gateway Program threatened to worsen.

Transit was the other constant. The 2008 federal budget had set aside $66.7 million toward the long-delayed Evergreen Line through the Tri-Cities under the Public Transit Capital Trust, but the project remained unfunded overall, and every party had something to say about how quickly Ottawa should move. Housing affordability around Metrotown, seniors' services in New Westminster, and manufacturing and forestry job losses across the region filled out the local debate.

Both cities had long labour traditions and had leaned to the New Democrats through most of the postwar period, and Julian had built a substantial personal organisation since the riding was created in 2004. As trade critic he spent much of the 39th Parliament attacking the Security and Prosperity Partnership talks with Washington and Mexico City and the free trade negotiations Ottawa had opened with Colombia — arguments that connected directly to a constituency with a shrinking industrial base.