Vancouver Kingsway, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Vancouver Kingsway

Kingsway cut diagonally across this constituency and gave it its name, but the riding reached much further west than the road suggests. From Boundary Road the line ran west along 49th Avenue to Tyne Street, jogged north to 41st Avenue and followed it to Oak Street, then turned north to 16th Avenue and back east along 16th and 15th to Nanaimo Street and the Grandview Highway. That took in Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Renfrew-Collingwood south of the Grandview Highway, the northern end of Killarney, and the Riley Park and South Cambie blocks around Queen Elizabeth Park. Trout Lake, the Joyce-Collingwood station area and the shops along Victoria Drive and Fraser Street were its other landmarks. Close to 120,000 people lived in twenty-one square kilometres.

Candidates

Don Davies (NDP) — Davies was a labour lawyer who had been director of legal services for Teamsters Canada Local 31 in Vancouver since 1992. Born in Edmonton, he took a political science degree and a law degree at the University of Alberta and moved to British Columbia with his family in 1991. He lived in Kensington and had been active at Vancouver Co-op Radio and in Lawyers for Social Responsibility. This was his first campaign for public office.

Wendy Yuan (Liberal) — Yuan was born in Beijing and built Bradley Pacific Enterprises, a Vancouver firm exporting Canadian goods and technology to Asian markets and a 2005 British Columbia Export Award nominee. She had won the Liberal nomination here once before, for the 2004 election, and stepped aside when the party recruited David Emerson; after he crossed the floor she took the nomination again in 2006. She spoke Mandarin and Cantonese and made recognition of foreign professional credentials a central plank.

Salomon Rayek (Conservative) — Rayek emigrated from Mexico with his wife and two sons and ran WeeStep Enterprises, a small business based in Richmond. He was British Columbia chair of B'nai Brith Canada and had been president of the Delta—Richmond East Conservative riding association before stepping forward here.

Doug Warkentin (Green) — A professional engineer living in Vancouver, Warkentin ran for the Greens.

Three smaller campaigns completed the ballot: Matt Kadioglu, a realtor, for the Libertarian Party; Kimball Cariou, a newspaper editor, for the Communist Party; and Donna Petersen, an office administrator, for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

The seat was open, and the reason was still raw. David Emerson had won it as a Liberal on 23 January 2006 and was sworn in to the Conservative cabinet as minister of international trade a fortnight later, before the new Parliament met. Opposition MPs asked the ethics commissioner to investigate; the commissioner concluded that neither Emerson nor the Prime Minister had broken the rules, but the anger in the riding did not subside. Emerson, by then also foreign minister, said in early September that he would not seek re-election, leaving the Conservatives to defend a seat their own member had never contested under their banner.

More than half the riding's residents had been born outside Canada. Chinese speakers formed the largest group by a wide margin, with a substantial Filipino community and long-established Vietnamese, Punjabi and Italian populations besides — a mix visible in the restaurants and grocers along Kingsway, Victoria Drive and Fraser Street and the shops clustered near Joyce Street.

Household incomes ran below the Vancouver average, and the economy was dominated by small business, retail, construction trades and service work, much of it family-run. Many residents commuted on the Expo Line, which skirted the northern edge, or by bus down Kingsway. Collingwood Village, around Joyce station, was one of the few places in the city where transit-oriented towers had been built at scale, while Kensington-Cedar Cottage was seeing the first serious wave of house prices pushing out long-time renters.

Federal issues here were practical ones: immigration backlogs and family reunification waits, recognition of qualifications earned abroad, settlement funding for language training, and the cost of housing. Public safety mattered too, after a run of shootings in east Vancouver. Provincially the area was represented by New Democrat Adrian Dix, and the federal party had been rebuilding its organisation since Emerson's defection.