All Surrey ridings could be see-saw election battlefields
Tories pursuing Liberal-held areas, with projections considering two as ‘toss-ups’
Surrey’s five federal ridings are at the heart of the suburban battleground in this tight federal election — they are all held by Liberals, but are the target of concerted Conservative efforts to paint them blue again.
That fight between the two front-running parties is most keen in South Surrey-White Rock, which was the only Surrey riding won by the Conservatives in the 2015 general election, when former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts won it by a slim majority.
But when Watts resigned her seat in 2017, Gordie Hogg, a former provincial cabinet minister and former White Rock mayor, snagged it for the Liberals in a byelection, again by a slim majority. Hogg’s opponent, former Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, is back in 2019 to try to reclaim the traditionally Tory seat.
“South Surrey-White Rock seems like it is the most vulnerable” for the Liberals, said Simon Fraser University political scientist Stewart Prest.
“That would be the one I would look to being the most unstable and interesting come election night.”
Hogg appears to be a strong Liberal MP, but byelections are not necessarily good predictors of what will happen during a general election and he won the riding at a time when the Liberals were in a prolonged honeymoon phase, which has since come “grinding to a halt,” Prest said.
Findlay, a lawyer who was elected as the Conservative MP for Delta-Richmond East in 2011 and served as revenue minister before being defeated in 2015, is also a well-known candidate who the Conservatives likely recruited with the intention of winning back this riding, Prest said.
Out on the campaign trail on Tuesday, Hogg said he hopes his longtime roots in the community will help him keep this seat which, before his 2017 victory, had not been Liberal for many decades.
“It’s clearly going to be a really tight one in this riding. The first time it was Liberal in recorded history was in the byelection,” said Hogg, who listed housing costs and public safety as important issues for voters. “I know the Liberals are very anxious to win this back.”
Findlay said she knew the riding would be a tough fight, but is working hard, has many volunteers and noticed a good turnout this weekend for advance voting.
“It is a tight race,” she said. “It wasn’t a see-saw riding historically, but it has been in the last while. I think there’s changing demographics here.”
The top concern in the riding, which has a mix of longtime residents and seniors, along with newer residents and young families, is affordability, she said.
The website 338Canada.com — which makes projections based on polling, electoral history and demographic data — predicts South Surrey-White Rock is “leaning” Conservative, while two other Surrey seats, Surrey-Newton and Surrey Centre, have a better chance to remain Liberal.
The two remaining Surrey ridings are listed as “toss-ups.”
In Cloverdale-Langley City, Liberal John Aldag is trying to hold his seat in a battle with Conservative Tamara Jansen, who The Vancouver Sun’s Daphne Bramham reported has come under fire for hosting blackface parties in the Dutch “Sinterklaas” tradition and for her creationist beliefs.
In Fleetwood-Port Kells, former TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie was swept to power by the 2015 Liberal wave and is trying to fend off his Conservative opponent, Shinder Purewal, a Kwantlen University political science professor.
Back in 2011, the Liberals placed third in this riding, well behind the Conservatives and NDP. Still, Prest believes Hardie has a better chance of holding this riding than Hogg does in White Rock, although he said the outcome is unpredictable.
“This is a case of one of these true three-corner contests, in which you can’t fundamentally count out any of the Liberals, NDP or Conservatives,” he said.
The NDP candidate in Fleetwood-Port Kells is Annie Ohana, an anti-racism educator.