Thomson had lock on riding in 2013
There’s a political divide in Gallagher’s Canyon — between areas that strongly supported the Liberals during the last B.C. election and areas that supported the Liberals even more strongly.
In the eastern half of the upscale Kelowna neighbourhood located around a golf course, residents voted 80 per cent in favour of the Liberals in the 2013 provincial election.
Support for the Liberals was even more enthusiastic in the western half of Gallagher’s Canyon, where 84 per cent of residents cast their vote for the governing party.
There were 155 polling areas within the riding of KelownaMission at the last election, and the Liberals won all but 12 of them. That level of support shows just how hard it will be on May 9 for NDP challenger Harwinder Sandhu to dislodge incumbent Liberal Steve Thomson.
Despite its name, KelownaMission includes all neighbourhoods south of Cadder Avenue, everything south of Highway 97 between Gordon Drive and Highway 33, and south Rutland.
Some Liberal victories were overwhelming, like the ones in Gallagher’s Canyon, throughout several Lower Mission lakeshore neighbourhoods, and in many Upper Mission subdivisions, where the party’s share of the vote exceeded 75 per cent.
The Liberals also won all but three of 40 polling areas in south Rutland, though not by such decisive margins.
“Rutland is really a very conservative area,” Al Horning, a lifelong Rutlander and former municipal, provincial and federal politician, said Tuesday. “There’s a lot of older people, who tend to be conservative, along with retired farmers.”
Many young families are also attracted to Rutland because of its somewhat less expensive housing, Horning says, and he believes they’re generally satisfied with the performance of the Liberal government.
Eileen Robinson, a longtime NDP activist who ran for the party locally, says the party’s lack of success in Rutland has long mystified her.
“Rutland certainly isn’t the pushover for the NDP that some people, even in our own party, think it should be,” Robinson said. “It’s a very diverse neighbourhood.
“In the old days, I think I knocked on almost every door in Rutland and I met a lot of people who had never voted for the NDP and said they never would,” Robinson said.
The few other Kelowna-Mission neighbourhoods where the NDP prevailed or was competitive with the Liberals in 2013 were those around Capri Centre Mall, made up mainly of older homes and rental apartment buildings, and in a few areas around Kelowna General Hospital.
Overall, Thomson won 57 per cent of the vote in the 2013 provincial election, Tish Lakes of the NDP won 26 per cent, Conservative candidate Mike McLoughlin won 13 per cent, and independent candidate Dayleen Van Ryswyk won five per cent.