Langley, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Langley

Two municipalities share the name. The City of Langley is a compact square of about ten square kilometres; it sits entirely surrounded by the Township of Langley, which runs from the Fraser River south to the American border and east to Aldergrove. Farmland covers most of the township's area, while nearly all of its people live along the western edge nearest Surrey, in Walnut Grove, Willoughby, Murrayville, Brookswood and Fort Langley. The township's population passed 90,000 at the 2006 census and was among the fastest-growing in Metro Vancouver.

Candidates

Mark Warawa (Conservative) — Born on 7 May 1950, Warawa worked in business and in loss prevention and sat on Abbotsford city council from 1990 until 2004, the year he was first elected to the Commons for Langley. On 10 February 2006 he was named parliamentary secretary to the Minister of the Environment and kept the post through the 39th Parliament, which put him in the middle of the government's response to the Kyoto Protocol and its Clean Air Act. He also sat on the Commons committee dealing with justice and public safety. He and his wife Diane raised five children in Langley.

Andrew Claxton (NDP) — Claxton taught English as a second language and carried the New Democratic nomination.

Jake Gray (Liberal) — A Langley resident who worked as a wind power developer, Gray ran for the Liberals in a campaign dominated nationally by Stéphane Dion's carbon tax proposal.

Patrick Meyer (Green) — Meyer advised on sustainable building and lived in the riding.

Ron Gray, a Langley resident who had led the Christian Heritage Party since 1995 and was still its leader during the campaign, appeared on the ballot for his own party; he had spent his working life as a newspaperman, at the Vancouver Sun, at community papers in British Columbia, at the Fiji Times in Suva, and later in the federal trade commissioner service.

About the Riding

Construction was the defining fact of the place in 2008. Crews were two years into the Golden Ears Bridge, an $808-million toll crossing that would tie Langley to Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge and replace the Albion Ferry that shuttled cars across the Fraser from Fort Langley; it was due to open the following June. Highway 1 widening under the provincial Gateway programme and the border crossing at Aldergrove kept goods movement and commuting near the top of the local agenda.

Agriculture held the rest of the map. Blueberry and cranberry fields, greenhouses, dairy barns and several hundred horse farms occupy the land inside the Agricultural Land Reserve, and pressure to convert that land for housing was a standing municipal argument. Fort Langley, the Hudson's Bay post where the colony of British Columbia was proclaimed in 1858, anchors the north end.

Post-secondary education had just changed shape. Kwantlen University College became Kwantlen Polytechnic University on 1 September 2008, six days before the writ dropped, and its Langley campus changed name with it. Trinity Western University, a private Christian institution founded in 1962, sits on Glover Road south of the Trans-Canada Highway and enrolled several thousand students.

The seat had been in Reform, Alliance and Conservative hands under one name or another since 1993. Langley was drawn as a separate riding in the 2003 redistribution, mostly out of Langley—Abbotsford, which Randy White had held since 1997; White ran in the new Abbotsford riding in 2004 and Warawa took Langley. The riding's mix of young families, small business owners and church congregations gave the Conservatives a base that neither the Liberals nor the New Democrats had managed to reach.