This is the third 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. This post deals with the Liberals.

2006 results

The Liberals’ vote had been inching down over each of the four elections prior to 2006, but in that year it took a much deeper dive of more than eleven points. This made the nomination process somewhat more complicated for the Liberals than it had been for the Conservatives or even for the New Democrats. It’s more difficult to attract a strong candidate if the riding doesn’t look winnable, and yet still important if you don’t want to lose too much ground. And of course there was the Liberal leader’s personal commitment to run one-third women candidates to consider as well. Given these factors, it’s unsurprising that the nomination process was a bit more of an ordeal in the Liberal camp.

First, on the Liberal Alberta website’s events page (which has since been taken down), the Liberals advertised a “Meet the Candidate” evening for mid-February 2007, with a guest speaker of John Cannis (Liberal MP for Scarborough-Centre), and a candidate speech by Tofael Chowdhury (a local clinical psychiatrist and an immigrant from Bangladesh). It was later updated to include a second speech by Andy Hladyshevsky, the lawyer who had run for the party in this riding in 2006. A few weeks after that event was held, then, the Edmonton Journal reported that Claudette Roy, a local advocate for bilingual education, would be seeking the nomination alongside Chowdhury. There was no mention of Hladyshevsky.

The nomination meeting was held at the end of March, and in the March 27th edition of the Edmonton Journal, it was reported that Roy had been acclaimed as the candidate. In that article, Alberta Liberal campaign chair Kevin Feehan told the Journal reporter that Chowdhury hadn’t sold as many memberships as Roy, and when he’d realized this a few days before the meeting, he’d withdrawn his name. A letter from Chowdhury appeared in the same paper a few days later, however, stating that he had in fact never formally applied as a candidate, and never made any attempt to sell memberships. He wrote that he felt his name had been “used to make Roy’s acclamation appear as if it were a contested nomination, when in fact Roy was acclaimed from the very start”, and that this had only been done because it was “embarrassing for the Liberal party in Alberta” that they were “having difficulty fielding candidates for nomination.”

Despite these tensions, there’s no faulting the candidate they ended up with. Claudette Roy has lived in Edmonton-Strathcona for over 25 years, and she works as a consultant for Alberta Education. In November of 2000, she was appointed to the Order of Canada for her efforts in agitating for French-language education in Edmonton, including helping to found the city’s first publicly funded French school. She also serves on the boards of several community service organizations, co-presides over citizenship ceremonies in her position as a member of the Order of Canada, and continues to be highly active in service to the Francophone community.

The media has largely been quiet on Roy and her candidacy since the nomination kerfuffle. There was a bit of flap nationally about the fact that Roy’s website pointed to the wrong “Green Shift” website, there was one article that featured one of her volunteers, and she’s sometimes mentioned in articles that discuss vote-splitting in the riding, but for the most part her campaign hasn’t been able to capture the attention of the media. This doesn’t necessarily suggest that there will automatically be the kind of further shift of votes from the Liberals to the NDP this time that would be necessary to give NDP candidate Linda Duncan a win, though. This riding is home to most of Edmonton’s Francophone community, and as a candidate who is not just a fluently bilingual Francophone, but who has made a career of fighting for Francophone educational rights, Roy holds a great deal of appeal for this tight-knit community of Edmonton-Strathconans.

Further reading:
Claudette Roy’s campaign website
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens