Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner

Spanning the southeastern corner and southern border region of Alberta, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner takes in the city of Medicine Hat, the adjacent town of Redcliff, and a broad sweep of agricultural and ranching country running west through Cardston to the edge of the Rocky Mountain foothills. The riding was renamed from Medicine Hat during the 2012 redistribution when its boundaries expanded south and west to include Cardston County, the County of Forty Mile, and Warner County.

Candidates

Jim Hillyer (Conservative) — Born in Lethbridge in 1974 and raised in nearby Stirling, Hillyer earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Lethbridge, where he also played violin in the Lethbridge Symphony. He later obtained a master's degree in political economy from George Wythe University in Utah and authored Coyotes and Indians (2006), a study of the history of the Blood Indian Reserve. Before entering politics, he worked as an entrepreneur and business consultant. First elected as MP for Lethbridge in 2011, he sought the Conservative nomination in the newly expanded Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner riding, where his home town of Raymond was now situated, and won the nomination by a nearly four-to-one margin.

Glen Allan (Liberal) — Allan carried the Liberal banner in a riding where the party hoped to build on national momentum but faced deeply entrenched Conservative support across rural southern Alberta.

Erin Weir (NDP) — Weir ran as the NDP candidate in a riding where the party traditionally drew single-digit support but entered the 2015 campaign with heightened visibility following the Alberta NDP's provincial win.

Brent Smith (Green Party) and John Clayton Turner (Independent) also stood for election.

About the Riding

Medicine Hat, with a population of about 63,000, is known as "The Gas City" for the vast natural gas reserves beneath it, which have sustained local industry since the late 19th century. The city sits at the confluence of the South Saskatchewan River and Seven Persons Creek, surrounded by the semi-arid prairies of Cypress County. Redcliff, just northwest of Medicine Hat, is a greenhouse capital, and the broader region supports irrigated agriculture, cattle ranching, and oil and gas production. To the west, the town of Cardston anchors a region with a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dating to settlement from Utah in the 1880s; the Cardston Alberta Temple, completed in 1923, was the first LDS temple built outside the United States. The Blood Tribe (Kainai Nation), one of the largest First Nations reserves in Canada by area, occupies land between Cardston and Lethbridge. The riding also abuts the Cypress Hills, a plateau of ecological significance that hosts Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. Federal issues during the campaign included agricultural trade and water policy, natural gas royalties, support for Indigenous communities, and the economic pressures of falling energy prices.