Who's going to win in Edmonton Griesbach?
NDP MP Blake Desjarlais faces former Conservative MP Kerry Diotte and Mark Carney's red wave
As Canada’s federal election enters its final week, I am taking a closer look at the race in the Edmonton Griesbach riding. It’s one of a surprisingly large handful of Alberta ridings that are considered competitive in this election and it also happens to be the riding I live and vote in.
The east central/north side Edmonton riding was where the NDP picked up their second seat in Alberta in the 2021 federal election when New Democrat Blake Desjarlais defeated two-term Conservative MP Kerry Diotte. This year’s election is a rematch between the two candidates but, despite traditionally being a blue-orange race, the Liberal Party’s surge could put that party’s candidate in the mix.
The first time I met Desjarlais was a few months before the 2021 election. I ran into him and a mutual acquaintance in the 112th Avenue business area in the Highlands neighbourhood. After chatting with Desjarlais for a few minutes, I walked away thinking “Wow. He sounds like a great candidate. It’s too bad he’s going to lose to the Conservatives.”
At that point, the NDP had come close but failed to defeat Diotte, who first won the seat in 2015 against Janis Irwin, who is now the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood.
It turns out my cynicism was misplaced, as Desjarlais defeated Diotte a few months later in the September 2021 elections.
That year’s election was held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a severe lack of local enthusiasm for the Conservatives, led nationally by Erin O’Toole and provincially by Premier Jason Kenney, resulted in a sharp drop in the party’s vote. It also helped Desjarlais’ campaign that Diotte, a former journalist and city councillor, had spent a lot of his time as MP courting controversy.
Desjarlais’ campaign was focused and well-organized, and boosted by high-profile support from Irwin, then-leader of the Alberta NDP Rachel Notley and Edmonton-North West MLA David Eggen, as well as two campaign visits by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.
When the votes were counted after Election Day in 2021, Desjarlais earned 17,457 votes to Diotte’s 15,957 votes (a 8,163 drop in votes for the incumbent Conservative from the 2019 election).
Desjarlais was 27-years old when he was elected, but his youth wasn’t a hindrance to his work as a Member of Parliament. He has been a thoughtful voice in the House of Commons and a hard-working representative who has been present in the constituency.
There’s no sign the NDP is any less organized today than it was four years ago. At least 2 of Desjarlais’ campaign volunteers have knocked on my door since the start of the election campaign and there are plenty of orange lawn signs on front lawns and in apartment windows across the riding.
Desjarlais also has the support of the local Alberta NDP organizations, with Irwin, Eggen, Notley, Edmonton-Decore MLA Sharif Haji, Edmonton-West Henday MLA Brooks Arcand-Paul, Edmonton-McClung MLA Lorne Dach, Calgary-Foothills MLA Court Ellingson and former MLA Ray Martin joining him to canvas the riding.
Singh hasn’t visited the riding during this campaign but he will make a second stop in Edmonton Centre tomorrow to support candidate Trisha Estabrooks, which suggests the NDP have confidence in Desjarlais’ re-election chances.
Diotte never drifted far from the political world after his loss in 2021. He worked for a stint as the political correspondent and Alberta Legislature bureau chief for Ezra Levant’s Rebel News website in 2022, which included a sit-down feature interview with Olympic champion-turned-COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Jamie Salé. He also joined the “Can’t Stop Alberta” roadshow featuring a cast of right-wing political activists.
It wasn’t long before Diotte was campaigning for the Conservative nomination again.
A handful of local Conservatives, including former constituency president and past UCP candidate David Egan and former MLA Dave Quest, launched efforts to defeat Diotte, but all of those opponents ended up withdrawing from the nomination contest. Most of Diotte’s nomination opponents endorsed City Councillor Karen Principe’s very-last-minute bid to defeat him, but she entered the race only days before the membership sales deadline so it was not a surprise when he won the vote.
Diotte knocked on a lot of doors during the Conservative nomination contest, including mine. I’ve known Diotte for years and we had a good conversation about politics in the riding when he stopped at my doorstep. He told me that he was meeting a lot of NDP voters who were unhappy with that party’s support agreement with the Liberals in Ottawa and were considering switching their votes to the Conservatives because of it.
A lot has changed since that conversation. This year’s election is being fought on very different terms than we expected a few months ago. The national polls show that a lot of voters have swung to the Liberal Party since economist and former national bank governor Mark Carney was sworn-in as Prime Minister and American President Donald Trump set his sights on destroying Canada’s economy.
While most lawn signs in Edmonton Griesbach are orange or blue, there are more red Liberal signs than usual. And for the first time since I moved to the riding more than a decade ago an actual Liberal knocked on my door - and it was even the local candidate.
The Liberals have a good candidate in Patrick Lennox. He has a PhD in United States-Canada relations and has even written a book on that very relevant topic — impressive credentials that feel made for this political moment. We had an interesting conversation about national and local politics in the ten minutes he spent at my doorstep, but like most Liberals in Alberta his campaign is running from behind.
The Liberals are riding a wave of national support, but as I’ve written before, they are flying by the seat of their pants in Alberta. Up until a month ago, Liberals in this province were reconciled to a historic defeat. They have since had to scramble to nominate candidates and organize campaigns in ridings they never expected to be competitive in this election.
Because it’s been a long time since the Liberals have been competitive or had a real organization in Edmonton Griesbach, it’s hard to predict how well Lennox will do on April 28, even with Carney’s red wave sweeping the nation.
Former city councillor Judy Bethel represented the old Edmonton-East riding as a Liberal MP from 1993 to 1997, and the Liberals placed second in the three elections that followed, but since 2008 the top two candidates have been Conservatives and New Democrats.
Desjarlais, Diotte and Lennox are the three main candidates in the race and they are the only candidates I’ve heard from. With seven days left in the federal election campaign, I’ve seen no sign of Communist Party candidate Alex Boykowich, Green Party candidate Michael Hunter, Marxist-Leninist Party candidate Mary Joyce, People's Party candidate Thomas Matty, Canadian Future Party candidate Brent Tyson, or Independent candidate Crystal Vargas.
Vote-splitting in Edmonton Griesbach
The Liberal surge in the national polls, which shows the Liberals jumping up to around 30 percent support in Alberta in some polls (the party’s highest levels of support in this province in almost sixty years), has led to a lot of discussion in this campaign about vote-splitting.
“Stop the Split!” was the key message of a recent pamphlet that Desjarlais’ campaign mailed to voters in the riding. The NDP campaign’s message is “Only Blake Desjarlais can defeat Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in Edmonton Griesbach.” The pamphlet doesn’t mention Diotte, which is interesting, and points out that in the last election the NDP earned 40 percent of the vote, the Conservatives won 37 percent and the Liberals finished third with 13 percent in the riding.
Discussions about vote-splitting in Edmonton, which usually revolve around defeating Conservative candidates, almost always devolve into cringeworthy arguments between Liberal and NDP partisans - which is why I try to avoid them.
Daveberta readers are smart people and it’s not my place to tell you how to vote. The furthest I’ll wade into the vote-splitting debate in my riding today is to say that it’s true that the Liberals are doing very well in the national polls and it’s also true that Desjarlais’ campaign is the better organized of the two main non-Conservative candidates in Edmonton Griesbach.
