This is the first in a series of four posts about each of the four major parties in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding, which will be posted in the order of the 2006 vote totals. Since the winner last election was Rahim Jaffer of the Conservatives, I’ll start with him.

2006 results

For the other three parties I will be talking about the three nomination processes, something that was comparatively trivial for Mr. Jaffer, as he has been the sitting MP since 1997. At the time he was first elected at the age of 25, he owned a coffee shop on Old Strathcona’s Whyte Avenue. Since then, he has been a professional politician who is rife with contradictions.

To the positive, he is friendly and pleasant–so much so that he has always been well-liked, even by his political rivals and their entourages. He’s an excellent speaker, he’s fluently bilingual in English and French, he’s attractive, and although he can no longer pass himself off as “youth,” in the grey-haired halls of Parliament Hill he still counts as young. For the most part, he comes across as harmless, which would arguably be damaging to some in his position, but as a Conservative MP in a mostly progressive riding, that impression has gone a long way toward making those who didn’t vote for him feel more at ease with him. He served as the Conservative caucus chair in this past Conservative minority government, a job in which he acquitted himself well, fielding press questions with ease and panache.

On the flip side, there are those reputation problems. In the past, these have zeroed in on issues such as honesty (such as the infamous radio show hoax for which he later apologized) and laziness (he used to be a frequent presence in the “laziest MP” category of the annual Hill Times survey), but more recently they’ve been about impressions of him as a party yes-man who doesn’t do anything for the riding or the city. And he only fans these flames by being infamously reluctant to say what he personally believes about anything controversial. In Parliament, he has supported the U.S. war on Iraq and stopped just short of outright climate-change denial, but in the riding, he has mostly gotten very adept at sidestepping any questions about these and other issues. Throughout the many (many!) times I’ve heard him speak, I’ve heard him parrot party policy, and I’ve heard him avoid answering direct questions about his personal opinions by saying that he would vote on various issues the way his constituents ask him to vote, but I’ve never heard him take a real stance. On anything.

His press during this term has been mixed. Most of the attention, of course, has been focused on his engagement to fellow MP Helena Guergis (Conservative, Simcoe-Grey) last October. It has mostly made for sweet, pleasant human-interest stories, but Guergis’s occasional comment that she couldn’t plan her wedding because the Liberals wouldn’t decide whether or not there would be an election (ironic, now, in the face of who exactly called this election) engendered a few eyerolls. The couple’s trip to Africa got some positive attention, as did Jaffer’s presence at the funeral of a Cessna pilot, while closer to home he was accused of “carpet-bombing” his riding with propaganda attacking the NDP in the form of taxpayer-funded “ten-percenters”. He was also at the top of Michael Geist’s list of “copyright MPs” who favour Jim Prentice’s “anti-education, anti-consumer, and anti-business copyright legislation”, who won their ridings by 10 percent or less in the last election, and whose ridings are home to a university. This was a distinction that even won him some attention by the widely read U.S. blog Boing Boing.

Ironically, whether Jaffer loses this election will almost certainly have precious little to do with the job he’s done as this riding’s MP, whether positive or negative. Instead, it will have a lot more to do with how Edmonton-Strathconans feel about Stephen Harper. Local Conservative voters were mobilized last time by the prospect of their party taking over from the Liberals and forming government for the first time. There was a lot of talk about how exciting it was that Alberta was finally going to be “in”. But now that that bright, shiny “New Government” has gotten a bit more tarnished with everything from the reality of governing to various scandals, and the local press has focused more on the issue of whether the prime minister and his party have been ignoring Edmonton, are those voters still satisfied enough to vote the same way again? If even a small number of those voters either stay home or vote a different way, Jaffer could be in some real trouble.

And then there’s the progressive side of the spectrum. NDP candidate Linda Duncan came closer to unseating Jaffer in 2006 than anyone else has since he was first elected (something that Jaffer himself seemed to take note of toward the end of the last election, as he resorted to last-minute automatic voice mail messages warning about the strength of the NDP in an attempt to get out his vote). But just as Jaffer doesn’t have control over conservative voters, Duncan doesn’t have control over progressive ones, either. This time the media seems to better understand which way the wind is blowing, which is sure to help–but do the voters? Has Duncan managed to get the message out to those Anyone-But-The-Conservatives voters that if you want a chance to to unseat a Tory, you have to vote for her? And even if she has, how many of them are willing to actually do so? This is a crucial issue in assessing the real level of Jaffer’s vulnerability. More about this in my next post, which will be about the New Democrats.

Further reading:
Rahim Jaffer’s campaign website
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens