Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission

Two river crossings were under construction inside this riding while the 2008 campaign ran — the Golden Ears Bridge, tying Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows to Langley across the Fraser, and a replacement for the aging Pitt River Bridge on the Lougheed Highway. Both spoke to the district's defining fact: a string of communities along the north bank of the Fraser whose residents largely earned their living somewhere else. Pitt Lake and the Coast Mountains close off the north, Golden Ears Provincial Park looms over Maple Ridge, and floodplain farmland fills the gaps between towns as far east as Hatzic.

Candidates

Randy Kamp (Conservative) — Kamp grew up in Maple Ridge, took an arts degree at Simon Fraser University and did graduate work in linguistics, then spent 1985 to 1992 in the Philippines as a regional director for an organisation working with minority language communities. He returned to pastor Maple Ridge Baptist Church until 1997 and later worked as an assistant to MP Grant McNally. He won the district in 2004, when it was still called Dewdney—Alouette, held it under its present name in 2006, and was parliamentary secretary to the minister of fisheries and oceans when Parliament dissolved.

Mike Bocking (NDP) — A journalist living in Mission, Bocking was president of the union local representing editorial and other staff at the Vancouver Sun and the Province and had spent years at the bargaining table. He had carried the New Democrat banner in this district in both 2004 and 2006 and had hosted party leader Jack Layton on visits to the riding.

Mike Gildersleeve (Green) — A social worker from Maple Ridge, Gildersleeve ran for the Greens.

Dan Olson (Liberal) — A project manager from Maple Ridge, Olson took the Liberal nomination in a riding where the party had slipped badly since the 1990s.

Also on the ballot were Libertarian Jeff Monds, a retail salesman from Coquitlam, and two independents: correctional officer Evans Nicholson and Chum Richardson, a retiree from Maple Ridge.

About the Riding

Maple Ridge, with roughly 69,000 residents, was the population centre; Mission held about 34,500 and Pitt Meadows around 15,600. Growth had been fast and was driven by price — young families bought here because they could not buy closer in. The result was a commuter economy: the West Coast Express ran weekday trains from Mission through Port Haney, Maple Meadows and Pitt Meadows into downtown Vancouver, and the Lougheed Highway carried everyone else. When pump prices spiked through the summer of 2008 before falling back in the autumn, the cost of that commute became a doorstep issue.

The older economy has not disappeared. Mission runs its own municipal forest under a tree farm licence granted in 1958 — the first held by a municipality in British Columbia, and fifty years old during the campaign — and the district's shake, shingle and cedar mills still cut local wood. Agriculture occupies the low ground: cranberry and blueberry fields in Pitt Meadows, dairy and horse properties in Maple Ridge, market gardens along the dikes. Public payrolls matter too, with the federal Mission Institution and the provincial Fraser Regional Correctional Centre both inside the boundaries.

The federal questions of 2008 arrived through housing, infrastructure and the river. Salmon habitat, the Fraser fishery and the interests of the Katzie and Leq'á:mel communities all fell inside Kamp's fisheries brief. Development pressure on the Agricultural Land Reserve, the tolls to come on the new Golden Ears crossing, transit service for outlying suburbs and the autumn's financial turmoil — which hit a construction-heavy local economy directly — filled out the campaign. The seat had gone Conservative in 2004 and 2006, and the same ground had returned Reform and Canadian Alliance members at the 1997 and 2000 elections under the Dewdney—Alouette name.