Victoria, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Victoria

Three local governments shared this constituency: the City of Victoria, the District of Oak Bay, and the southeastern corner of Saanich lying east and south of a line up Shelbourne Street and out along McKenzie Avenue past the University of Victoria. Inside those forty-three square kilometres stood the legislature and the Inner Harbour, the heritage blocks of downtown and James Bay, the Oak Bay waterfront and the university campus — a compact coastal seat of about 109,000 people with an older population than almost any comparable urban riding in Canada.

Candidates

Denise Savoie (NDP) — Savoie had held the seat since 2006 and was the New Democrats' critic for post-secondary education and literacy. Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, she took a master's degree in French literature at the University of British Columbia and a second in language education at the University of Grenoble, and taught French at Royal Roads Military College. From 1999 to 2005 she sat on Victoria city council and on the Capital Regional District board, concentrating on transportation and land use and pressing the Galloping Goose Trail as a commuting route.

Jack McClintock (Conservative) — McClintock spent thirty-two years as a police officer in Vancouver, Victoria and Central Saanich, and had also served as a conservation officer in Alberta and the Yukon. Retired from the force, he campaigned on crime and drug enforcement and on support for veterans and the local military community.

Anne Park Shannon (Liberal) — Shannon worked as an economic and policy consultant in Victoria after a career in Canada's foreign service that included heading the economic and financial section of the embassy in Tokyo during the 1980s; she had also worked at the federal finance department, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. Her campaign emphasised trade, the environment and Canada's position in the Asia-Pacific.

Adam Saab (Green) — A carpenter living in Victoria, Saab stood for the Greens in a city where the party consistently recorded among its strongest results in British Columbia.

John Cooper, a physician, also ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Government was the industry here. The legislature, the provincial ministries clustered around it and a large federal presence gave the riding an unusually high concentration of public-sector employment, and CFB Esquimalt, just beyond the western boundary, drew thousands of civilian and uniformed workers from inside it. Tourism came second, built on the Inner Harbour, the Empress, the Royal BC Museum and the cruise ships at Ogden Point. The University of Victoria and Camosun College's Lansdowne campus added tens of thousands of students and staff between them.

Sewage was the local file that would not go away. Greater Victoria still discharged screened but untreated effluent into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and in July 2006 the provincial government directed the Capital Regional District to move to land-based treatment. The projected cost ran to hundreds of millions of dollars, and how much Ottawa would contribute was a direct campaign question for every candidate.

Homelessness was the other. The city counted roughly 1,500 people without housing against a few hundred shelter beds, fewer still outside the winter months, and encampments in downtown parks had become the most visible municipal issue of the previous two years; the bylaws against overnight shelter in those parks were challenged in the British Columbia Supreme Court that summer. The federal role in housing and mental health funding was raised at every all-candidates meeting, and retired residents, a large share of the population, pushed pensions, drug costs and health care up the agenda alongside it.

The riding's politics had been unsettled for two decades. Progressive Conservative Allan McKinnon held Victoria from 1972 to 1988, New Democrat John Brewin took it in 1988, and Liberal David Anderson won it back in 1993 and kept it until he retired in 2006, serving in a succession of Chrétien and Martin cabinet posts including environment from 1999 to 2004. Savoie's victory in 2006 was only the second the New Democrats had recorded in the capital, and she entered the campaign with a strong local profile and a divided field of challengers.