Make no mistake, the Liberals and New Democrats have their eyes on this city, and the Burnaby-Lougheed race will be a hotly contested seat.
Burnaby-Lougheed, in the northeast quadrant of the city, stretches from Sperling Avenue to North Road, and from in the Burrard Inlet to south of th Highway 1. The riding includes Simon Fraser University, Burnaby Lake, Burnaby Mountain and Kinder Morgan's pipeline and marine terminal, where tankers fill up with crude.
It's also the riding where the 2007 pipeline rupture happened, and many residents are not thrilled with Kinder Morgan's plan to expand the existing pipeline.
According to the B.C. Stats riding profile (based on 2006 census data), Burnaby-Lougheed has a population of 48,640, and roughly half of those people are visible minorities, mainly Chinese. The average income of Burnaby-Lougheed residents is $78,904, slightly below the provincial average, and the top occupations are clerical, sales and service, professionals in the sciences and educators.
Liberal MLA Harry Bloy has held the riding, since he was elected during the Liberal landslide of 2001. (The riding was called Burquitlam, but the boundaries and name changed in 2009.) Bloy won the 2009 election with 9,207 votes, while the NDP runner-up secured 8,511 votes - a difference of just 696 votes. (In the previous 2005 election, Bloy won on an even thin margin - fewer than 400 votes.) Premier Christy Clark has already pointed to the close races and told her supporters "the only way we will win government is if we win the Burnaby ridings."
After a series of controversies, Clark announced that Bloy would not run in the 2013 election. Both the NDP and the Liberals are now running fresh faces in this riding, which is one of only two Burnaby seats recently held by Liberals. New Democrats hold all of the city's federal and municipal seats, including the school board and city council. If it's true that people tend to vote for parties, rather than individual candidates, then the real test between Liberal Ken Kramer and New Democrat Jane Shin is who can get more of their supporters to the polls while staying out of trouble for the next two weeks. With the NDP polling ahead of the Liberals, possibly poised to take over B.C., it's entirely plausible Burnaby-Lougheed will swing to the left in what's already a predominantly NDP-run town.
