Liberal challenger Steve Noskey had some definite pockets of support, but it was far too little to derail the Pearl Calahasen juggernaut. Calahasen won her sixth straight victory in the Lesser Slave Lake riding in the Mar. 3 election, joining 71 of her colleagues in a Progressive Conservative landslide across the province.
Calahasen won 65.24 per cent of the popular vote, or 3,390 votes. See Page 3 for the poll-by-poll results.
Calahasen says her priorities in her next term will be to get the roads paved in the riding, including the Seal Lake Road near the Peavine Metis Settlement, and ensure the new hospital in High Prairie is built.
Other communities will receive her attention too, including Slave Lake, which voted heavily for her. For instance, she wants to ensure the petroleum sector continues to prosper.
“We want to make sure that the oil and gas industry continues to flourish in this province,” she says. “But we also want to make sure that we get our fair share of the royalties.”
Besides the Calahasen re-election, the other big story is how few people actually voted in the Lesser Slave riding.
According to information from the returning office, a measly 26 per cent of eligible voters showed up at the polls. That beats the previous all-time low of 32 per cent, set in the 2004 provincial election. Provincially, the turnout was 41 per cent, also an all-time low.
In Lesser Slave Lake, eligible voters numbered 19,474, up from 18,660 four years ago. Of those 3,390 voted for Calahasen, 1,114 for Noskey, 423, for New Democrat Habby Sharkawi and 269 for Bonnie Raho of the Green Party.
“Two-hundred fifty-nine? I would have thought more than that,” says Raho.
In spite of the low numbers for the Greens, Raho predicts that environmental concerns will continue to come to the fore. “There is a change in consciousness that is happening,” she says. “It may not be in my lifetime, but it is definitely happening. Our time will come.”
Noskey, although just another in a long list of Liberal also-rans, may be heartened by the fact he did so much better than the last Liberal candidate to challenge Calahasen. He got more than twice the number of votes Doris Bannister did in the ’04 election.
Noskey did particularly well in those communities where he is well known. He won the popular vote in Little Buffalo, Cadotte Lake, Chipewyan Lake and Trout Lake, tied Calahasen in Loon Lake and trailed by one in Peerless Lake. He did fairly well in some of the Wabasca polls too, but overall it was far too little.
“In terms of Slave Lake and High Prairie, I just didn’t have enough time to make a real dent,” he says.
NDP candidate Habby Sharkawi says she didn’t have a lot of money to run her campaign, and her strategy was to go door-to-door. She was able to find out a lot about voters’ concerns this way.
“I’m really happy that I had the opportunity to get out there and hear people’s views, and what their concerns for the area are,” says Sharkawi.
She, too, would like to have seen a better turnout for the election.

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