EDMONTON – Michael Cooper has won the riding of St. Albert-Edmonton for the Conservative Party.
This was a riding to watch: St. Albert-Edmonton had been held by the Conservatives from 2004, when it was created, to June 2013, when MP Brent Rathgeber quit the party caucus to sit as an independent.
“In municipal politics I think people are quite comfortable voting on the basis of the candidate, but I think certainly in provincial and federal politics people vote on the basis of the party or they vote on the basis of the leader,” Rathgeber said of the challenges of running as an Independent.
“It’s often difficult to get somebody over that mental hump that they can actually vote for a candidate as opposed to the party,” he added. “And obviously the voters decided that they were more comfortable having a Conservative representative than an Independent representative.”
Rathgeber had been seeking re-election to a third term. Cooper was one of Rathgeber’s biggest supporters when he was running for election in 2008. The two friends faced off in a race some predicted could see the right-leaning vote split in two.
They ran against NDP candidate Darlene Malayko, Liberal candidate Beatrice Ghettuba, and Green Party candidate Andrea Oldham.
Formerly called Edmonton-St. Albert, this riding’s name has been reversed, reflecting that it is now much more St. Albert than Edmonton. Only neighbourhoods in Edmonton’s extreme northwest are now included in this riding.
Full results from the 2015 federal election
More information about this riding
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