Small-town mayors 'excited' Pierre Poilievre targeting seat in rural Alberta
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CALGARY — The prospective new riding for federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is home to wheat fields, dinosaur bones and Nickelback.
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It's also Tory country through and through.
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Battle River—Crowfoot in central Alberta is a long way from the Ottawa riding that was Poilievre's home base for more than 20 years, as he seeks to regain a seat in the House of Commons.
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Damien Kurek, a three-time elected member of Parliament, is relinquishing his seat in Battle River—Crowfoot to allow Poilievre to run in a byelection there later this year, the Conservative Party of Canada announced Friday.
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Kurek walked to victory in Monday's election with 82 per cent of the vote, one of the most lopsided races in the country. Poilievre lost his seat in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton to Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy.
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'I'm kind of excited,' said Danny Povaschuk, mayor of Hanna, the town northeast of Calgary that produced Flames legend Lanny McDonald and rock band Nickelback.
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'We're in Alberta. We're blue, right? I'll call it a privilege, actually, to have him in our riding here, and I'm relatively confident he should be able to win again.'
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Poilievre's decision to run in the riding will be viewed by some as a homecoming for the born-and-raised Calgarian. Before moving to Ottawa in his early 20s to start his political career, he attended high school in the city's southwest and graduated from the University of Calgary.
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For riding locals, he's familiar only by name.
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Wainwright Mayor Bruce Pugh said he has mixed feelings.
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'Is it going to be high-profile, low representation? Is it going to be that kind of situation? Right off the bat, I don't think so,' Pugh said.
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Kurek's departure will be a loss, Pugh added, as they worked closely together.
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Battle River — Crowfoot is a vast and sparsely populated riding that, according to Elections Canada, is almost 53,000 square kilometres in size — larger than countries like Switzerland or the Netherlands. The population is about 110,000, putting population density at about two people per square kilometre.
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