This is the second 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. The second-place candidate in 2006 was Linda Duncan of the New Democrats, and so Duncan and her party are dealt with here.

2006 results

For the NDP, the Edmonton-Strathcona results weren’t good enough to win in 2006, but they were still a milestone. For one, it was the best showing the party’s ever had in the riding. But even more importantly, in this riding that has always relied on vote-splitting to deliver a Conservative MP to Ottawa, it was both closest anyone’s come to unseating Rahim Jaffer since he was first elected in 1997, and the first time the other parties’ vote was low enough for anyone to be able to make a strong case for voters to rally behind a single candidate. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the post-2006 NDP candidate nominating process dealt more with trying to convince Duncan to run again rather than a riding-wide candidate search. This made the nomination race a rather trivial affair, because as soon as Duncan did decide to run again, any interest anyone else might have had in the position dried up. And she hasn’t stopped campaigning since then.

I don’t think I’m being overly partisan in saying that Duncan has an impressive career behind her. She held a senior portfolio as the Chief of Enforcement for Environment Canada, and also served as Assistant Deputy Minister for Renewable Resources for the Yukon Government. Internationally, she’s been a senior legal advisor to the Indonesian, Bangladeshi and Jamaican governments in instituting programs for effective environmental enforcement, and as Head of Law and Enforcement for the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, she also spent four years working with Canadian, American and Mexican officials. More locally, she founded Alberta’s Environmental Law Centre, and helped found the Society for the Protection of Architectural Resources in Edmonton (SPARE), the Catalyst Theatre, the Edmonton Rape Crisis Center, and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. In Todd Babiak’s new column in the Edmonton Journal on September 10th, he declared: “If this Conservative city in the prime minister’s home province has a star candidate with a national profile in the 2008 federal election, from any party, it’s Duncan.”

It should be said that that kind of attention from the media is a fairly recent phenomenon in the Duncan camp. Her late 2006 public declaration that she was seeking the nomination was attended by almost no one but party insiders, and while the alternative papers covered it, it barely made a dent in the mainstream media. That began to change, though, with her nomination meeting in January of 2007. Nearly 400 people crowded into Garneau’s City Arts Centre to watch Duncan be crowned the candidate, and having federal NDP leader Jack Layton as the guest speaker drew a significant media presence as well. Most of the subsequent coverage focused on Layton, but Duncan’s name got out there too. Since then, Layton has made a grand total of four additional visits to the riding, prompting one observer to remark that you couldn’t “swing a cat” without hitting the NDP party leader in Edmonton-Strathcona these days. This attention has prompted increased coverage of Linda’s campaign during this election season, and she has appeared not just several times each in all of the various local television, radio, and print media, but also on a smaller scale in the national media as well, including CBC’s nightly television news programme “The National.”

Every candidate has their negatives, though, and Duncan is no exception. She wasn’t always as good a speaker as she is these days, prompting Edmonton-Strathcona-based blogger daveberta to remark during the 2006 election that he “hadn’t been incredibly impressed with her performance at the various candidates’ forums.” She is also infamously blunt and brutally honest, and often says things that make party highers-up cringe (especially when these things get quoted in the media). But while this prolonged campaign has been brutal for everyone across Canada, it’s been good for Duncan on both of these fronts. Observers at the upcoming all-candidates’ forum next Thursday night can expect to find a still-outspoken but slightly more polished Duncan going up against Jaffer this time.

A lot of the buzz on the ground in the riding this time has centred around one phrase: “can she actually win?” Phrased like that–i.e., with a ‘can’–I think the answer has to be yes. Without any change at all to the Conservative vote, Duncan would only have to increase her own vote by nine points to tie Jaffer. A look at the available data shows that not only has the NDP vote been steadily going up in the riding over the past five elections, it actually increased by…how about that, nine points!…in each of the 2004 and 2006 elections. If she can manage that performance again, it will be a nail-biter. And if any of Jaffer’s 2006 Conservative vote either stays home or goes to another candidate, she’ll have won handily.

But just as Jaffer’s vote will depend in large part on Edmonton-Strathconans’ level of satisfaction with Stephen Harper, the number of people who are willing to swing Duncan’s way in this election will largely depend on how people feel about voting for Jack Layton’s NDP. Overall, Layton is a comparatively popular leader, but those who hate him–i.e., boatloads of the kinds of more partisan Liberals Duncan has yet has to win over in Edmonton-Strathcona–really hate him. The NDP’s strategic choice to ignore the Liberals in favour of attacking only Stephen Harper’s Conservatives could work to Duncan’s advantage, because to win, Duncan needs to gain the trust not just of those Liberal voters in the riding who are unhappy with Stéphane Dion, but also those who are more interested in voting against the Conservatives than they are in voting their conscience. But if the national NDP strategy were to change on that front, inevitably pissing off that not-exactly-small contingent of Edmonton-Strathconans, Duncan would have a much more difficult time of coming from behind to overtake Jaffer.

So the actual open question is less “can she win” and more “will she win,” and for an answer to that one, we’ll have to wait until October 14th. One way or another, though, I think we can all agree that these are exciting times in Edmonton-Strathcona.

Further reading:
Linda Duncan’s campaign website
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens