Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Okanagan—Coquihalla

Two very different landscapes sat inside this southern Interior seat: the orchard and vineyard benches above Okanagan Lake, and the dry ranch country of the Nicola Valley on the far side of the Coquihalla summit. Penticton anchored the eastern end and Merritt the western, with Summerland, Naramata, Peachland, Logan Lake and the Westside communities across the lake from Kelowna filling in between. About 107,000 people were spread over roughly 10,600 square kilometres of rangeland, fruit bench, mountain highway and lakeshore subdivision.

Candidates

Stockwell Day (Conservative) — Day had represented the riding since a by-election in September 2000 and went into the campaign as Minister of Public Safety, the portfolio handed to him when the Conservatives took office in February 2006. His earlier career was in Alberta, where he sat in the provincial legislature and served as treasurer, and he led the Canadian Alliance into the 2000 general election. His home was in Kelowna, immediately outside the riding's boundaries.

Ralph Poynting (NDP) — Retired and living in Merritt, Poynting campaigned out of the western end of the constituency, on the far side of the Coquihalla from the Okanagan towns.

Dan Bouchard (Green Party) — Bouchard worked as a community liaison coordinator in Penticton, handling events and marketing for the downtown business association. He was raised in the South Okanagan and had studied in the interior.

Valerie Hallford (Liberal) — A community activist from Kelowna.

About the Riding

Fruit and wine defined the Okanagan end. Vineyards and orchards covered the benches around Penticton, Summerland and Naramata, and the federal research station at Summerland — opened in 1914 and breeding tree-fruit varieties since the 1920s — had shaped what grew in the valley for the better part of a century. Wine tourism expanded quickly through the 2000s, filling a growing roster of estate wineries and supporting a hospitality economy that ran hot in summer and thin the rest of the year.

The Nicola Valley half worked on a different rhythm. Merritt was a ranching and sawmilling town; Logan Lake existed because of Highland Valley Copper, the largest open-pit copper mine in Canada, seventeen kilometres to the west. Both lived with commodity prices, and the interior forest sector was already contracting under the mountain pine beetle infestation and a collapsed United States housing market when the campaign began.

Highway politics arrived mid-campaign. On 26 September, addressing the Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention in Penticton, Premier Gordon Campbell announced that the toll on the Coquihalla Highway was being scrapped; the booths came down the next day. The road tied Merritt to Hope and Kamloops and carried much of the riding's freight and tourist traffic, and Merritt's council had pressed for the change for years.

The population skewed older than the province. Penticton, Summerland and Peachland had drawn retirees for decades, and pension security, health care and drug costs were steady doorstep subjects. West of the lake, the fast-growing Westside communities had incorporated as their own district municipality in December 2007 and were still assembling local services. Water supply and the protection of farmland in a valley under constant development pressure ran through federal and provincial debate alike, and the seizing up of credit markets in the final weeks gave the riding's construction and tourism employers something else to worry about.