To no one’s surprise, incumbent Conservative MP Brian Jean won re-election in the Ft. McMurray-Athabasca riding in the Jan. 23 federal election. He did even better than his first time out, polling 20,342 votes (unofficially), compared to 17,942 in the 2004 election.
“That’s a big increase,” Jean told The Leader the day after the election. “I’m very happy and I appreciate all the votes I got.”
The improvement reflected the national trend, which saw Stephen Harper’s Conservatives gain 25 seats, mostly at the expense of the Liberal Party. Jean was part of a Tory blue sweep of all 26 Alberta ridings.
The Liberal result in Ft. McMurray-Athabasca was even more anemic than usual. Mel Buffalo earned 4,663 votes, good for a very distant second place, and 1,300 fewer votes than Doug Faulkner got in 2004 for the same party.
Roland Lefort of the New Democratic Party finished in third place with 4, 573 votes.
That was a decent improvement over his party’s 2004 result of 3,049, but nowhere near the 29 per cent of the popular vote he was aiming for. That’s what the NDP won in the 1988 election. Back in town last Thursday, he told The Leader that he is already working on building a team for the next election, which he anticipates might be as soon as 18 months from now.
“I’m committed to running again,” said the Ft. McMurray oilsands worker.
Bringing up the rear with 437 votes was John Malcolm of the First People’s National Party of Canada, a brand new political entity that ran only a handful of candidates.
Hopfe and Malcolm have all expressed an interest in running again.
The Leader intended to run poll-by-poll results for Slave Lake and area, but those figures were not available by press time.
The turnout for the election was pretty poor, at 48.5 per cent of eligible voters in the riding, compared with 64.9 per cent nationally. In 2004 the figure for Ft. McMurray-Athabasca was 47.8.
Jean’s share was 64.5 per cent of the vote – a landslide by conventional definition, but less impressive when compared with the 66 per cent of the electorate who didn’t vote for him. However, many of those probably would have voted Conservative if they had bothered.
Buffalo’s share of the vote was 14.78 per cent, with Lefort just behind at 14.5. Hopfe’s result was virtually unchanged from 2004, at about five per cent of the popular vote.

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