Newton—North Delta, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Newton—North Delta

Newton is the largest of Surrey's town centres, a spread of subdivisions, strip malls and industrial land running east from Scott Road with King George Boulevard down its middle; it carried a large share of the city's businesses and much of its industrial land. North Delta is the inland corner of the Corporation of Delta, cut off from Ladner and Tsawwassen by farmland and peat bog, and made up of Annieville, Sunshine Hills, Nordel and the Scottsdale area. This riding joined the eastern part of Delta to the western and central parts of Surrey, with Scott Road, the boundary between the two municipalities, running down its spine and Highway 91 crossing it.

Candidates

Sukh Dhaliwal (Liberal) — Dhaliwal was born on 1 October 1960 at Sujapur in Punjab and came to Canada in January 1984. He took an engineering degree at the University of Calgary, qualified as a professional engineer and a British Columbia land surveyor, and co-founded a surveying firm in Surrey. He was active in Surrey municipal politics as well, and had sought a council seat in 1999. He contested this riding in 2004 and lost narrowly to Conservative Gurmant Grewal; when Grewal did not run again in 2006, Dhaliwal took the seat for the Liberals and went into the 2008 campaign as its member.

Sandeep Pandher (Conservative) — Pandher worked as an environmental consultant and lived in Delta.

Teresa Townsley (NDP) — Townsley was vice-chair of the Delta board of education.

Liz Walker (Green) — Walker, retired and living in Surrey, was the Green candidate.

Three others filled out the ballot: James William Miller-Cousineau, a small business owner from Delta, and John Shavluk, a Delta marina operator, both ran as Independents, and Harjit Daudharia, a Surrey pensioner, stood for the Communist Party.

About the Riding

Surrey was adding people faster than almost any city in Canada, and Newton absorbed a large share of them. Punjabi was the first language of about a third of the riding's residents, gurdwaras and community associations organised much of its social life, and Punjabi-language radio and newspapers reached more voters here than the mainstream outlets did. Both the Liberals and the New Democrats had long-standing organisations inside those networks, and the Conservatives had been working to build one.

Immigration policy was therefore a doorstep issue in a way it was not in most ridings. Changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act carried in the spring 2008 budget bill, which gave the minister authority to set priorities for processing applications, drew sustained criticism from settlement organisations and from family-sponsorship applicants facing multi-year backlogs. Crime was the other recurring theme, after a run of shootings connected to the drug trade in Surrey through the middle of the decade, which put sentencing and RCMP staffing on every party's platform.

The local economy ran on warehousing, trucking, construction, retail and light manufacturing along the Highway 91 and Highway 10 corridors, with berry farms and greenhouses on the Delta uplands. Most residents worked outside the riding, and transit service was thin: there was no SkyTrain station inside the boundaries, the nearest being Scott Road station north of the riding in Surrey North, and buses handled everything else. The South Fraser Perimeter Road, a four-lane truck route planned along the south bank of the Fraser from Deltaport to Surrey, cleared provincial environmental assessment in 2008 over objections about its effect on Burns Bog and on the farmland it would cross.

The seat had only been contested twice before, and had already changed hands once. It was among the most closely fought constituencies in British Columbia, with three parties all holding real support.