Below is my final chart of how the democraticSPACE projected vote totals in Edmonton-Strathcona have changed over time (between September 25th and October 12th). The graph displays averages of democraticSPACE’s projected ranges.  According to these averages, the Conservatives are currently projected as one point ahead of the NDP, but the democraticSPACE projection model doesn’t take potential strategic voting into account.

I’m glad I’m not in the position–as the real masterminds behind democraticSPACE are–of having to make a prediction about this race. It’s simply not possible this time. I admit to having access to a bit more data than democraticSPACE has, but even so, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I will say that I can foresee anything from a rather more marginal win than usual for Conservative candidate Rahim Jaffer (if the progressive strategic vote for NDP candidate Linda Duncan turns out to be weak or non-existent) to a comfortable win for Duncan (if the Liberal vote collapses into the single digits). Both of those scenarios are possible. More likely than either one, though, is one of the various nail-biter scenarios in between. At this point it all comes down to three factors: 1) how well the Tories are able to get out their vote, 2) how well the NDP is able to get out its vote, and the most important and yet least controllable factor: 3) just how strong the Anybody But the Conservatives movement is in the riding–i.e., how willing the Liberal and Green voters are to switch their votes to oust a Tory.

It’s already been said by the Ottawa Citizen, the CBC, the Calgary Herald, and the National Post, but to say that this is a riding to watch is a massive understatement. And for all those denizens of the riding who are sick of your vote not counting, well, just consider this election a rare gift.  Because oh boy does it count this time.

Further reading:
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Winners and losers in Edmonton-Strathcona
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens

Below is a chart of how the democraticSPACE projected vote totals in Edmonton-Strathcona have changed between September 25th and October 8th. The graph displays averages of democraticSPACE’s projected ranges.

With this current situation in mind, here are the things each of the four main parties will have to achieve in order to call this election a success.

The Conservatives:

The Conservatives have to keep their seat. That’s really all. In the end it doesn’t really matter whether their vote total goes up or down or stays the same as long as incumbent Rahim Jaffer stays in Parliament for a fifth term.

How likely are they to get their wish? Well, at the moment, the democraticSPACE projections do favour them, but only slightly. If NDP candidate Linda Duncan can cut only a few points out of the Liberal vote, she can win. This is going to be a tough battle, and an impossible race to call. Still, the odds are in the Conservatives’ favour, as is history.

The New Democrats:

In the 2006 election, just massively increasing the vote for the New Democrats was enough to call it a success. This time is different–this time they need to take the seat from the Conservatives. Anything less is a massive defeat, even if they increase their vote percentage enough to only lose by a few votes.

What’s their likelihood of success? Well, they’re clearly the underdogs in this race, but the softness of the Liberal vote is the wild card. The Liberals for Linda blog has been getting plenty of coverage in the local media, and Duncan has scored endorsements from the likes of former Liberal candidate Steven Leard and Liberal blogger daveberta. Plus, the Duncan team is both hungry for a win and willing to work for it–just as an example, they recently sent out a team of more than a hundred volunteers to canvass more than 5000 houses in the Tory-bluest part of the riding in a single afternoon. Don’t count them out yet.

The Liberals:

They can’t win, but to call this election a success, they need to recover from the 2006 election’s eleven-point drop in their vote. Maintaining their vote wouldn’t quite cut it–they really do need to recover some ground in order to have achieved something for their party in this election.

Are they likely to achieve this? In a word: no. Now that Edmonton-Strathcona has been reported as a close two-way race between the Conservatives and the NDP everywhere from the National Post to the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun to CBC radio, Anybody But Conservative voters in the riding pretty much all know the score. The Liberal candidate has been publicly asked to step down at an all-candidates’ forum, and her anti-NDP brochures are being panned by the media. Whether enough of the Liberal vote migrates to the NDP to achieve a Duncan win is still an open question, but one thing is certain: the Edmonton-Strathcona Liberals will suffer further losses in this election.

The Greens:

Like the Liberals, they can’t win. But in the 2006 election, Edmonton-Strathcona was the only riding in Alberta where the Green vote actually decreased. So in order to call this election a success, they need to reverse that trend and increase their percentage of the vote.

What is their likelihood of success? Pretty good, actually. In fact, I’d say that of each of the four parties, the Greens are the most likely to walk away from this election happy.  The fact that NDP candidate Duncan is a well-known environmentalist will almost certainly still prevent the Green surge we’ll see in the rest of the province, but the Green vote is soaring across the country right now, and it would surprise me a great deal if they didn’t gain at least a little bit of ground in Edmonton-Strathcona.

Further reading:
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens

Just in case the race in Edmonton-Strathcona wasn’t quite exciting enough for you already, get a load of this new wrinkle: “Tories polling scared” in the “Liberals for Linda” blog.

A local firm called Bannister Research has begun polling in Strathcona. I was called. The questions were:

1. How likely am I to vote
2. Which party am I going to vote for (no list provided)
3. Which candidate in Edmonton Strathcona am I going to vote for (no list provided)
4. What do I think is the most important issue

I don’t think that the NDP or the Liberals are likely to be commissioning any polling. The firm is the very same that in 2004 released a poll on the Mayoralty race that showed former Mayor Bill Smith in the lead.

Of course, Stephen Mandel went on to win, and it was later revealed that the Bannister poll was commissioned by Smith’s campaign. A bit dodgey wouldn’t you say?

This poll could only have been commissioned by the Conservatives. I can only assume that they know that they are in trouble.

It’s a fascinating set of accusations: one, the notion the Tories have commissioned a poll in Edmonton-Strathcona, and two, that they hired a firm that might just be willing to play dirty pool with the numbers.  Whether true or not, I have to say, it’s starting to feel a bit like a bad Hollywood film out here.  And there’s even some theft involved, since Mr. Liberal for Linda nicked my graphic without permission.

Was anybody else in Edmonton-Strathcona polled?

The latest riding-by-riding seat projections here at democraticSPACE include one less seat for the Tories.  That riding is Edmonton-Strathcona.

Below is a chart of how the projection has changed over the course of the past week. The graph displays averages of democraticSPACE’s projected ranges.

Whichever way this goes, it’s almost certainly going to be very close.

Further reading:
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens

The first of several Edmonton-Strathcona all-candidates’ forums took place last night at the University of Alberta.

The signs of this riding being a real race were everywhere. The media were there (both print and television), there was a much larger crowd than usual, and perhaps most tellingly, there were young Conservatives handing out highlighted photocopies of a nasty SUN editorial about the NDP in an attempt to scare off anyone who might be impressed enough with Linda Duncan to switch their vote. This is all night and day from 2006, when interest in these forums was minimal at best. Terribly exciting for any armchair politico!

In any case, I didn’t take notes, but luckily there are plenty of other sources you can consult to find out how it went:

• “Exchange of Ideas” (Edmonton Journal)
• “Strathcona federal election candidates take to Horowitz (The Gateway)
• “Edmonton-Strathcona all-candidates’ forum” and “Reflecting on Roy” (Terahertz)
• “Edmonton-Strathcona candidates: a review” and “Live from the Edmonton-Strathcona forum” (Daveberta)
• “Eye on Rahim Jaffer” (No Longer Dormant)

Let me know if I’ve missed any, and I’ll link to them. The Linda Duncan campaign has also released some footage from the debate on youtube.

If you missed this forum, or are simply a glutton for punishment, here are the other upcoming ones that I’m aware of:

• Monday, October 6th at 7pm at Kings University College at 9125-50 St.
• Wednesday, October 8th at 7pm at the Garneau United Church at 11148-84 Ave. (Jaffer will not be attending this one.)

DemocraticSPACE doesn’t endorse strategic voting, and their strategic voting guide exists far more to tell the vast majority of people NOT to vote strategically than to convince skeptics to do it. But if you look at the data, there actually are a small handful of ridings in which voting for your second-choice candidate could help avoid electing your least favourite candidate.

Edmonton-Strathcona is one of those ridings.

The qualifications for the list are stringent. For a riding to make the list, all three of the following three things need to be true:

1. It must be a close 2-way race (i.e. the two competing parties must be within 5%)
2. The chances of a third/fourth/fifth party winning the riding are remote (i.e. current support for those parties must be less than ~20%)
3. A small number of votes from supporters of the third/fourth/fifth party can make a difference (i.e. fewer than 1 in 3 voters).

This means that according to democraticSPACE’s notoriously reliable mathematical model, fewer than 1 in 3 Liberals or Greens voting NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona could make the difference between a win for NDP candidate Linda Duncan and a win for Conservative candidate Rahim Jaffer.

When you can say something like that about a riding in Alberta, we’re definitely living in exciting times. And they say Canadian politics is boring!

A Canadian Press piece that ran in several places today, including the Calgary Sun, made the claim that “experts of all stripes say there is little evidence to suggest any upsets will occur in this election” in Alberta. Bad news for the progressives in Edmonton-Strathcona, right? Not so fast.

First, let’s have a look at who these “experts of all stripes” are. The Canadian Press interviewed the following three people for the article:

• David Taras, a professor at the University of Calgary
• Conservative MP Peter Goldring (Edmonton East)
• Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer (Edmonton-Strathcona)

The latter two “experts of all stripes” are easily dismissed. Of course Peter Goldring and especially Rahim Jaffer want to downplay any fears the Tories might have of losing Edmonton-Strathcona–any excitement among progressives that they could actually unseat a Tory increases the likelihood of a united progressive front.

But what about this David Taras fellow? He’s a professor at the University of Calgary–that means he knows what he’s talking about, right? Well, he may well know what he’s talking about in general, but he’s also shown an unfortunate propensity in the past for giving interviews to the media that have less to do with available facts and more to do with whatever David Taras feels like spouting off about at any given moment. He is, after all, the same David Taras who claimed with a straight face that an iconic phrase from the Canadian national anthem was a) in the American national anthem and b) printed on U.S. license plates.

So since those “expert opinions” are problematic, let’s have a look at the actual evidence. First, there’s the data from past elections that suggests that if trends continue the way they have in 2004 and 2006, NDP candidate Linda Duncan can actually win handily. And as for the current election, we don’t even have to look beyond democraticSPACE itself to come up with far better data on what’s going on in Edmonton-Strathcona than the mere speculation these “experts” provide. The current democraticSPACE projection, based on a mathematical model that translates regional polling data into seat projections, puts the Conservatives at 35-37% and the NDP at 33-35%. By Greg Morrow’s own estimation, this makes Edmonton-Strathcona the only Alberta riding that’s “too close to call.” For that matter, the ordinarily notoriously accurate democraticSPACE actually underestimated the NDP vote in Edmonton-Strathcona last election by six points. Assuming Morrow is using the same model to calculate his projections this time, there’s every likelihood he’s off by the same amount again, and that would actually put Duncan ahead.

Please note that I’m not saying Duncan will win. In fact, I put a lot of faith in the democraticSPACE projections, and based on the current one, if I had to bet a million dollars one way or the other, I’d bet against her. But I’m also awfully glad I don’t have to bet a million dollars, because if you look at the actual data rather than just talking through your hat, every bit of it suggests that she could win. And for that matter, if the NDP’s numbers continue their current upward trend across the country, this “Conservative win likely but too close to call” riding will quickly turn to “NDP win likely but too close to call.”

If the Canadian Press really wanted to claim that “experts of all stripes” had told them that there is “little evidence” to suggest any Alberta ridings could go anything but Tory, they should have actually a) spoken to experts of all stripes, and b) examined the available evidence.

This is the last in a series of four posts about each of the four major parties in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding, which are posted in the order of the 2006 vote totals. This post deals with the Greens.

2006 results

The Greens did quite well across Alberta in the 2006 election, increasing their vote totals almost across the board, often drastically. Edmonton-Strathcona, on the other hand, was the only riding in the province where the Green vote went down last election, both in terms of percentage and in terms of actual votes. This seems to be traceable back to the presence of local environmental lawyer and international environmental law consultant Linda Duncan as the NDP candidate, who came a strong second.

The winter of 2007 was nomination season in Edmonton-Strathcona, and the Greens were no exception. In mid-February Don Hill, former broadcaster for the popular Wild Rose Forum on Edmonton CBC radio, was nominated as the candidate. This was confirmed a few weeks later in the See Magazine article “The Return of Don Hill: Broadcaster carries Green flag in Strathcona” (which can now only be read in cache), and in a letter from Elizabeth May about issues concerning the nomination procedures in the riding, reposted in a blog.

I won’t be delving into the details of rumours I don’t have print sources for, but just generally we can talk about the period that followed as the rumour period. First, there were rumours that, for various reasons, Hill wasn’t actually going to run. Then there were rumours that David Parker, who actually ended up running in Edmonton Centre, was going to replace him. Then there were rumours that the local Greens were thinking about not running a candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona at all, so as not to dig into the potential vote for NDP candidate Linda Duncan. Finally, current candidate Jane Thrall was nominated earlier this month.

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The Toronto Star reported yesterday that Harper “lives in a bubble”:

Rallies are off-limits for any member of the public who just shows up. Nobody gets in unless they have been pre-registered by the local riding association. Even local media are asked to sign up in advance.

Anyone wanting to attend an event featuring Harper has to have his or her name vetted by the RCMP, said a source at Conservative campaign headquarters, who would only talk on background yesterday. He said this rule applies even outside the campaign period, so no one–”even a staffer not scheduled to be there”–can show up unannounced at a Harper speech and expect to be let in.

The Harper campaign keeps a short leash on national and local media, limiting questions and access to local candidates, sometimes calling on RCMP security to block reporters from doing their jobs.

This story was well-timed for us here in Edmonton, as the local media discovered at Harper’s invitation-only rally in the city last night. “He took no questions from the crowd or media,” the Edmonton Journal wrote. Even the Tory-friendly Edmonton Sun made a mention of this, stating that “after his 30-minute speech, Harper left Edmonton without talking to the media.” In fact, the details about the event were kept such a tightly controlled secret that when one of the local bloggers at Alberta Get Rich or Die Trying called Edmonton-Centre MP Laurie Hawn’s campaign office to try and get information about the event, Hawn’s own staffers said: “we’re having a really hard time getting any details about this thing.”

Now, we could have a discussion here about whether or not we think this practice is ethical, whether we think it’s annoying, or whether we think it’s appropriate. But I’m actually more interested in discussing whether it’s strategically smart, specifically with respect to the Edmonton event. I mean, presumably Harper thinks the bubble will win him more votes than opening himself up to public contact would. And in general, he’s probably right. But in the Edmonton case in particular, he clearly made a stop here primarily to support his candidates in the two ridings that the Conservatives are most concerned about holding onto this election: Edmonton-Strathcona (which the Conservatives could lose to NDP candidate Linda Duncan) and Edmonton Centre (which the Conservatives could lose to Liberal candidate Jim Wachowich). And to accomplish that, you have to get the people in those ridings excited about Harper and their local MPs. And that’s hard to do when you don’t even let the people in to your event.

For that matter, if Harper was relying on the local media to get the word out about how important those Edmonton MPs are for his plans for the country, it didn’t work–the resulting coverage barely mentioned them. The star of the show was apparently Greenpeace, with Harper as second fiddle and his local MPs nowhere to be seen. That’s a far cry from the front-page stories after the Jack Layton rally that referred to two local NDP candidates as stars and directly quoted Layton’s words of praise about them.

I don’t know; it just seems to have been a strange strategic choice, from a man who’s supposed to be a master of strategy. And as so often with the Conservatives, I’m left wondering what I’m missing.

Lots more Edmonton-Strathcona events coming up!

First, there are the two upcoming All-Candidates’ forums. The one at the University of Alberta has been moved to Monday, September 29, 2008 from 7:00pm – 10:00pm, and it will take place in the Myer Horowitz Theatre (2nd Floor, Students’ Union Building) on the U of A campus. More details can be found on Facebook here. There will also be a second forum at the Garneau United Church on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm, at 11148-84 Ave. More details of this one can be found on Facebook here.

The Linda Duncan campaign is holding a pub event tomorrow night starting at 10pm at the Empress Ale House (details on Facebook here), a youth blitz and party at noon on Saturday, September 27th (details on Facebook here), and a large canvass-and-party at noon on Saturday, October 4th (details on Facebook here)

Finally, here are also rumours of an event being held in the city with Stephen Harper sometime tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem to have been advertised anywhere. If you do know the details, please post them here, and I’ll update. [Update: It seems the event is an invitation-only affair. Never mind.]

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.

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Two of the Edmonton-Strathcona candidates are hosting events today, Saturday September 20th. Linda Duncan and her team are welcoming federal NDP leader Jack Layton today at the Winspear Centre (Sir Winston Churchill Square, downtown). The event takes place from noon until two, and all are welcome. If you’re on facebook, you can get all the details here.

Rahim Jaffer and his team are holding a Meet and Greet his afternoon at the campaign office from 3 to 5, and in the evening there will be an event at the Urban Lounge at 10544 Whyte Avenue. If you’re on facebook, you can get all the details here and here.

Also, don’t forget the All-Candidates’ Forum, to be held at 7pm on Thursday, September 25th postponed to Monday, September 29th at the Myer Horowitz Theatre on the U of A campus (second floor, Students’ Union Building, 8900-114 St.). The format will be a moderated debate followed by an open question-and-answer period with questions taken from members of the audience. The details are on facebook here.

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

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

The riding of Edmonton-Strathcona is a mostly urban riding with some suburban regions off to the south and east. It is one of the most diverse ridings in Alberta, as nearly 17% of the population are immigrants, and the riding is also home to most of Edmonton’s sizeable Francophone community. Its population is just shy of 100,000, and as with the rest of the province, it has been suffering the growing pains of being part of a boomtown.

Albertans have a well-deserved reputation for being politically apathetic, but as in so many other ways, Edmonton-Strathconans seem to be the exception. The riding had the highest voter turnout in the province in the 2006 federal election, weighing in at a whopping 70.6%. Of course, in part, this seems to have been because even then, there were signs of this riding being a real race:

2006 election results

A glance at those results clearly suggests Edmonton-Strathcona is a classic case of the Conservatives only being able to win by exploiting the vote-splitting among the progressive parties. But a few factors make this riding more interesting than your typical “Conservative comes up the middle” riding. For one, in Edmonton-Strathcona, those votes are anything but evenly distributed throughout the riding. Support for the Conservatives, for example, is concentrated in the large, sparsely populated suburban polls off to the eastern and southern parts of the riding:

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Hello, my name is Jennie, and I’ll be your Edmonton-Strathcona blogger this election.  Feel free to kick off your shoes and rest your feet on the coffee table–I’ve never been much of one for formality.  There’s beer in the fridge and munchies on the table.

There are some things you might want to know about me before we begin.

As an immigrant from the U.S., I’m not a native Edmontonian, but it’s quite literally the only place I’ve ever called home.  I’ve lived here for more than eleven years now, longer than any other single place I’ve lived, and nearly ten of those have been in Edmonton-Strathcona.  I have the passion of a convert for this city, its people, and the things that make it unique.

I have been blogging as Idealistic Pragmatist since 2004, and like any blogger, I have my own little bugaboos and pet issues.  My U.S. background sometimes shows through when I complain about U.S. influences on Canadian politics.  I am an electoral reform activist, and I frequently use my other blog as a soapbox for my analysis of why our current system doesn’t work and what would work better.  I tend to prefer civility over raw anger, and rational argument over polemics.

I am also currently volunteering for the Linda Duncan campaign in Edmonton-Strathcona.

I’ve quite definitely chosen a side in this race, in other words, and I’m not going to hide that fact.  I am, however, going to do my very best to cover this race as a citizen journalist rather than as a shill for Linda Duncan.  I don’t promise to be non-partisan, but I do promise to be fair.  If at any point you don’t think I’m managing to hold myself to that standard, feel free to call me on it.

First, I’m going to write a piece about the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, its demographics, its political history, and its current quirks.  After that, I will write one piece each on the four main parties competing in this race, their respective nomination processes, and, ultimately, their respective candidates.  I’ve been paying very close attention to what’s been going on in Edmonton-Strathcona since the day after the last election, and I think I’ve probably got some things to say that people in the riding might not be able to hear about in the mainstream media.  After that, I’ll assess the situation on the ground in the riding and take it from there.

I will do my best to make it worth your while to stick around and keep raiding my virtual fridge.