Races to watch
Evangelicals engage federal politics across the country
Lloyd Mackey
Special to ChristianWeek
The following are Lloyd Mackey’s “picks” for ridings and candidates to watch in the January 23 federal election. He sees the points of interest to evangelical Christians as relating to the ability of Christian politicians to dissent from or support party policies, on the basis of their understanding of the faith/politics.
Richmond (B.C.): Darrel Reid/Raymond Chan
The Richmond, BC, riding pits two evangelicals against one another: Darrel Reid for the Conservatives and incumbent Liberal cabinet minister Raymond Chan.
This area has one of the highest concentrations in Canada of people of Chinese extraction—many of them evangelical Christians and fairly recent immigrants.
Reid is the former president of Focus on the Family Canada and chief of staff for Reform Party founder Preston Manning. He earned his PhD in history at Queen’s University, partly under the tutelage of the late left-leaning evangelical historian, George Rawlyk.
Reid won the Conservative nomination for Richmond, which drew several thousand voters, by a margin of only six.
Chan, too, is an evangelical Christian, connected with a Vancouver area Chinese Mennonite Brethren church. He supports the male-female definition of marriage, but voted for Bill C-38, the same-sex marriage legislation, as was required of cabinet ministers.
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Calgary Centre-North (AB): Jim Prentice
Calgary Centre-North Conservative incumbent Jim Prentice is one of only four Tories who voted with the Liberals on Bill C-38.
Before doing so, he issued a statement noting that both he and his church affirm marriage as being between a man and a woman. He is a member of Grace Presbyterian Church, a downtown Calgary evangelical congregation.
Prentice ran a strong second against Peter MacKay for the Progressive Conservative (PC) leadership before the PC/Canadian Alliance merger in 2003.
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Churchill (MB): Bev Desjarlais
The NDP has represented the northern Manitoba riding of Churchill in the last two parliaments in the person of Bev Desjarlais, a former hospital office worker from Thompson who came into politics through the union movement.
Once in parliament, she drew strength for her Christian faith through her involvement in the weekly parliamentary prayer breakfast, which she chaired for two years.
Her thinking and faith led her to vote against Bill C-38, despite NDP leader Jack Layton’s dictum that his party would allow no free vote on the issue. She lost her party’s nomination, seemingly as punishment, and is now running as an independent.
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Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale (ON): David Sweet
David Sweet, former president of Promise Keepers (PK) Canada, fell short by about 2,000 votes when he ran for the Conservatives in 2004 in Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale, a mixed suburban rural riding west of Hamilton. There were mixed views as to whether his prior connections to PK, an evangelical men’s ministry, helped or hindered his candidacy.
Since the last election, Sweet has honed both his understanding of the faith/politics interface and his profile in the community, as business development vice-president of the Work Research Foundation (WRF).
The WRF has strong Christian Calvinist ties and informal links to Ancaster’s Redeemer University College, one of Canada’s emerging Christian universities.
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Huron-Bruce (ON): Paul Steckle
Paul Steckle is the Liberal incumbent from Huron-Bruce, a rural small town riding bordering on Lake Huron.
A Mennonite farmer-businessman who has chaired both the House of Commons standing committee on agriculture and the parliamentary prayer breakfast, Steckle was first elected to parliament in 1993.
Some of his supporters suggest he has never made it to cabinet because of his stance against same-sex marriage. But out of party loyalty he has resisted the temptation of jumping to the Conservatives.
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Essex (ON): Jeff Watson
As one of two Conservative MPs who are members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union, Jeff Watson has found himself in CAW president Buzz Hargrove’s political cross hairs.
The incumbent for the Essex riding near Windsor, Watson worked for Daimler-Chrysler before being elected to parliament in 2004.
Watson and his wife, Sarah, homeschool their four children as part of their commitment to pass on their own Christian faith and background.
Watson’s union background helps create a dichotomy in the New Democratic Party. Hargrove, in contrast to party leader, Jack Layton, wants union members to vote Liberal rather than NDP, where it will help block Tories from election.
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Miramichi (NB): Charles Hubbard
The incumbent Liberal in Miramichi, a city cluster in northwest New Brunswick, Charles Hubbard receives pastoral care consistently in a Presbyterian church in his home riding, and in Ottawa through the parliamentary prayer breakfast.
An MP since 1993, Hubbard had careers in public school teaching and the military.
He is one of 32 Liberals who voted against the government on Bill C-38. And he consistently supports legislative initiatives proposed on both sides of the house, favoring sanctity of life and traditional marriage.
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Sackville-Eastern Shore (NS): Paul Francis
The minister of a Mennonite Brethren church in the Halifax suburb of Lower Sackville, Paul Francis hopes to bring his faith-based social action experience to parliament on January 23.
Francis helped grow Gateway Community Church from scratch to an attendance of around 200 in 15 years. He is running for the Conservatives in Sackville-Eastern Shore.
He and his wife Kathy have worked with Gateway to build both community and international relations through such organizations as the Metro Food Bank and the Mennonite Central Committee.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa. He is the author of More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and insights on Canadian leaders doing politics Christianly (BayRidge Books) and The Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper (ECW Press).
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