Braid: Rivals not worried about riding shifts

Well, so much for pesky Calgary-Currie, the provincial riding the opposition just keeps winning.

Currie, inner-city home to MLA Dave Taylor, simply vanishes in the tentative redistribution unveiled Thursday. The ridings's boundaries change radically. Much of old Currie turf gets a new name, Calgary-Killarney.

This smells like what we coots still call a gerrymander -- the changing of boundaries to favour one party, usually the government.

Oddly, though, opposition MLAs who might be at risk aren't making that charge. They're not even upset. In these strange times they think they can beat Tory candidates no matter what the riding boundaries look like.

Wildrose MLA Paul Hinman, whose Calgary-Glenmore riding gets heavy cosmetic surgery, is always ready to sniff a Tory plot. Although he suspects one here, he isn't worried about it.

"I'm shocked they've made so many changes in boundaries even though that's what the Tories do," Hinman says.

"But the bottom line is I just have to go out and talk to a bunch of new people. I've already won a rural riding they said I couldn't, and then we won the Glenmore crown jewel from the Tories in Calgary.

"Talking to people about what the Wildrose Alliance is going to do, that's what it's about," he says. Boundaries be damned.

The fate of Dave Taylor's riding (ritual murder, basically) is usually enough to send an opposition MLA into fits of pension-threatened rage.

But Taylor, Like Hinman, seems unconcerned.

"When God hands you lemons you make lemonade," he says, "but at this stage I don't even know if I've got lemons.

"The new riding looks like a pretty good mix of communities. And with the state of politics today, who knows how people will vote in two years anyway?

"At this point, all I care about is that my access card still gets me into the legislature."

Taylor says he'll eventually have to decide whether to run in the new Killarney riding, take on Tory Alison Redford in heavily remodelled Elbow or run against Kent Hehr in Buff alo, also much changed.

"Oh no, wait a minute," Taylor jokes. "Kent's a Liberal. I won't run against him."

Ridings held by Tories disappear too. Egmont (Jonathan Denis) and Nose Hill (Neil Brown) would be gone. Both MLAs face the same plight as the opposition members -- where do they run?

However nostalgic they feel about those old ridings, the Tories won't be sorry to

see the end of Currie, the riding named after a military barracks now equally defunct.

Currie was becoming a bad party joke after Taylor's two wins. There was trouble in 2006 too, when the riding executive was painted, incorrectly, as a nest of plotters behind the party vote against then-premier Ralph Klein.

The sinking of Currie sends out waves right across south Calgary. Virtually every riding will change, and a new one, Acadia, springs into existence.

One the north side, the creation of the new Country Hills and Hawkwood ridings has the same effect; cascading boundary changes in all the others across two quadrants.

This will complicate life for all parties and their workers, although most Calgarians won't care or even notice. What matters for the city is the riding count. And Calgary will have 25, a gain of two.

If that's gerrymandering, give us more.

dbraid@theherald.canwest.com