The federal opposition parties are in no hurry to put forward candidates to run in the new Red Deer-Mountain View electoral district for next year's election.
With Alberta's electoral map redrawn heading into the 2015 federal election, a number of people, mostly Conservatives, have announced their intentions to seek their party's nomination in the province's 34 new ridings.
But for Red Deer-Mountain View, which includes Mountain View and Red Deer counties and is within the current Wild Rose electoral district, only Conservative MP Earl Dreeshen, who represents the current Red Deer riding, has announced his intentions to run here.
George Soule, associate director of media for the federal NDP, said his party has opened the floor for nominations in Alberta but it is up to individual riding associations to decide when they want to hold nomination meetings.
He added the NDP riding association in this electoral district is still getting organized.
“There are some people who are kind of taking an interest (in activating the Red Deer-Mountain View riding association) lately but we don't have much action on when they want to have a date,” Soule said. “They're just kind of constituting themselves with the new redistribution.
“People are just kind of shuffling around.”
The NDP have not put any deadline in place as to when nomination meetings have to be held, he added, but the party does intend to run a candidate in each of Canada's 338 ridings next year.
“I think if you see what happened to us in Quebec, we're not taking any riding for granted and we're also not writing off any riding either,” Soule said.
In the last federal election in 2011, the NDP candidate in the Wild Rose riding, Jeff Horvath of Canmore, came in second behind the electoral district's current Conservative MP, Blake Richards, with 6,595 votes.
The Liberal Party of Canada's response to questions about who may run in this riding in 2015 echoed those of the NDP.
“The nomination meeting in Red Deer-Mountain View has not been called yet,” Andrée-Lyne Hallé, a Liberal Party spokeswoman, wrote in an email. “It will be called at a date determined by the (party's) Alberta Election Readiness Campaign Co-Chairs.”
When asked if she was aware of anyone who had expressed interest in running for the Liberals in Red Deer-Mountain View, Hallé wrote “In terms of names, we cannot confirm any potential contestants until they are official.”
John Douglas Reilly, who ran for the Liberals in Wild Rose in 2011, came in fourth in the polls with 3,908 votes.
The Green Party of Canada, which came in third in the Wild Rose riding in the last federal election with 4,071 votes for candidate Mike MacDonald, did not respond to a request for comment about the party's intentions for 2015 prior to press deadline.
Geoffrey Capp, the Alberta provincial president for the Christian Heritage Party's national board, said his party has not designated a candidate for the new riding yet and he has not heard of any interest from anyone wishing to run for the party at this point.
“(The election) is still over a year away and redistribution is still something that we have to organize ourselves around as well,” he said.
The party does not have riding associations in Alberta, Capp added, and so the party leader appoints candidates.
In the 2011 election, the CHP ran candidates in six ridings in Alberta.
The candidate for Wild Rose, Randy Vanden Broek, received 181 votes in that election.
Richards, who has homes in Olds and Airdrie, announced in early February he would seek the Conservative Party's nomination in the new Banff-Airdrie riding for the 2015 election.
Shortly afterward, Dreeshen, who calls Pine Lake home, announced he will run in the Red Deer-Mountain View riding.
The new Red Deer-Mountain View riding was carved out of the current Wild Rose electoral district after Alberta's electoral boundaries were changed last year following a study and final report from the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for the Province of Alberta.
The main reason for the electoral boundary changes is to reflect Alberta's growing population and the commission argued an increased number of ridings would allow for better representation in Parliament.
The number of federal seats in Alberta has jumped from 28 to 34.
Red Deer-Mountain View will include part of Red Deer in the north and extend southwards to include Carstairs and west to include Sundre.
Its population is 108,465 people, compared to the Wild Rose riding's population of more than 138,000 people.
Canadians are scheduled to go to the polls in October 2015.
