Vancouver East, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Vancouver East

Vancouver East collected the oldest parts of the city and some of its poorest, running from Burrard Inlet south to 16th Avenue and east from Cambie Street and the Dunsmuir Viaduct to the Burnaby line. Chinatown, Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside occupied its western end; Mount Pleasant east of Ontario Street held the southwest corner; Grandview-Woodland and the Commercial Drive strip lay in the middle; and Hastings-Sunrise, the Pacific National Exhibition grounds and the port lands filled the northeast. Some 107,000 people lived in twenty-one square kilometres.

Candidates

Libby Davies (NDP) — Davies had represented the riding since 1997 and had been the New Democrats' House leader since 2003. On 27 September 2007 Jack Layton also named her one of the party's two deputy leaders, alongside Thomas Mulcair. She came to Canada from England in 1968 as a teenager, left university to organise in the Downtown Eastside, and helped Bruce Eriksen found the Downtown Eastside Residents Association in 1973. She sat on the Vancouver Park Board from 1980 and won a city council seat for the Coalition of Progressive Electors in 1982, holding it through four more elections. In Ottawa she was among the most persistent defenders of harm reduction and of the supervised injection site in her own riding.

Ken Low (Liberal) — A professional engineer living in Vancouver, Low took on the Liberal campaign in a constituency the party had not carried since 1993.

Ryan Warawa (Conservative) — Warawa, a payroll administrator from Burnaby, stood for the Conservatives in a seat the party had never come close to winning.

Mike Carr (Green) — A university instructor based in Vancouver, Carr ran for the Greens on environmental and community-economy themes.

Two other candidates completed the field: Betty Krawczyk, a writer long involved in British Columbia's forest-protection campaigns, for the Work Less Party, and Anne Jamieson, a registered nurse, for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

No other constituency in Canada packed such a range of circumstances into so few square kilometres. The Downtown Eastside, with its single-room-occupancy hotels, drop-in centres and street market, sat within walking distance of the renovated houses of Strathcona and the cafés of Commercial Drive. Tenants outnumbered owners by roughly two to one, a large minority of residents were immigrants, and the Chinese-Canadian community around Pender and Keefer was among the oldest in the country.

Drug policy dominated the federal conversation. On 27 May 2008, months before the writ dropped, Justice Ian Pitfield of the British Columbia Supreme Court found that applying the federal drug law to Insite breached the Charter. He struck down the offending sections with effect from mid-2009 and gave the facility an immediate exemption so it could stay open while Parliament reconsidered the statute; Ottawa appealed. Whether federal policy on addiction should emphasise enforcement or treatment and harm reduction was argued on doorsteps here more than anywhere else in Canada.

Housing was the other constant. The Woodward's site at Hastings and Abbott, empty since the department store closed in 1993 and occupied by squatters in 2002, was well into construction as a mixed development combining social and market housing with a new home for Simon Fraser University's contemporary arts school. Elsewhere, condominium projects pushing east from downtown and north from Mount Pleasant raised fears that low-income tenants would be displaced before the 2010 Olympics.

The economy rested on the port, the rail yards along the inlet, warehousing and light manufacturing in the Grandview-Boundary lands, an unusually large non-profit sector, and independent retail along Commercial Drive, Hastings Street and Main Street. The seat had gone to the CCF and then the New Democrats at every election since 1953 but two — Art Lee took it for the Liberals in 1974 and Anna Terrana in 1993 — and by 2008 it was among the safest the party held anywhere west of Ontario.