Surrey North, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Surrey North

Surrey North covered the older, denser northern end of the city: roughly 49 square kilometres bounded by the Fraser River on the north and west, the Trans-Canada Highway and 152nd Street on the east, and 88th Avenue on the south, dropping to 80th Avenue between King George Highway and 128th Street. Whalley and the emerging City Centre district sat at the middle, Guildford spread east toward 152nd Street, and the industrial flats of Bridgeview ran along the water. About 112,000 people lived inside those lines.

Candidates

Dona Cadman (Conservative) — Cadman won the Conservative nomination in October 2007, seeking the seat her husband Chuck Cadman had held from 1997 until his death in July 2005. He was elected first for Reform, again for the Canadian Alliance in 2000, and returned in 2004 as an Independent after losing the Conservative nomination. Their sixteen-year-old son Jesse was stabbed to death in a Surrey street attack in October 1992, and the couple founded CRY — Crime, Responsibility and Youth — the following year, pressing Ottawa for a decade afterwards to toughen youth sentencing. Retired, she lived in the riding.

Rachid Arab (NDP) — A quality manager living in Surrey, Arab picked up the New Democrat campaign after Penny Priddy decided against a second run. Priddy had sat for Surrey-Newton in the provincial legislature from 1991 and held the women's equality, children and families, health and education portfolios in cabinet before taking Surrey North in 2006; she announced in July 2008 that she would not run again. The riding had been contested since 1988, and the New Democrats had carried it twice.

Marc Muhammad (Liberal) — Self-employed and a Surrey resident, Muhammad carried the Liberal banner in a riding where the party had not been competitive in recent contests, running largely on the national platform and the carbon-pricing package Stéphane Dion released in June.

Dan Kashagama (Green) — A journalist based in Surrey, Kashagama argued for denser, greener growth in a municipality expanding faster than almost any other in British Columbia.

Five smaller campaigns rounded out the ballot: Kevin Pielak, a teacher, for the Christian Heritage Party; Alex Joehl, a meat cutter, for the Libertarians; Bernadette Keenan, a plan reviewer, as an Independent; Nikolas Langlands, a manager, for the Progressive Canadian Party; and Psam Frank, a Coquitlam musician, for the Canadian Action Party.

About the Riding

Surrey North was young, crowded and heavily immigrant. Close to half its residents had been born outside Canada, and its concentration of South Asian families — Punjabi-speaking above all — was among the highest anywhere in the country, with Tagalog, Mandarin and Hindi also common along King George Highway and 104th Avenue. Wages trailed the Metro Vancouver norm and unemployment ran above it, and the economy leaned on manufacturing, warehousing, retail and construction rather than the office towers across the river.

Simon Fraser University had absorbed the former Technical University of British Columbia at Central City in Whalley in 2002 and moved into a purpose-built campus above the mall in 2006, anchoring redevelopment around King George station, then the eastern terminus of the Expo Line. The provincial Gateway Program promised a South Fraser Perimeter Road along the riverbank through Bridgeview and a widened Highway 1 corridor.

Crime and sentencing carried unusual weight here. Chuck Cadman had built a national profile on victims' rights and youth justice; the Tackling Violent Crime Act received royal assent on 28 February 2008; and Surrey's RCMP detachment, the largest in Canada, dealt with property crime, drug activity and gang shootings around the Whalley strip that were staples of local coverage.

National attention had already settled on the riding once that year. Ahead of the March 2008 publication of Tom Zytaruk's biography of Chuck Cadman, reports circulated of an account attributed to Dona Cadman that Conservative officials had offered her husband a life insurance policy before the confidence vote of May 2005. Stephen Harper said he had known nothing of any insurance offer and sued the Liberal Party for libel over its description of the affair; in May the RCMP said it had found no basis for charges. Cadman stayed on as the party's candidate throughout.