Close race in Fleetwood-Port Kells likely with Garry Begg running for NDP

The federal election is set for Oct. 19 of this year. It will be a hard-fought contest, with the Conservatives, NDP and Liberals all polling quite close together thus far, although there are significant regional differences.
In Surrey, the election got a lot more interesting yesterday. Garry Begg, a recently-retired inspector with Surrey RCMP, announced he is seeking the NDP nomination in Fleetwood-Port Kells.
There will be five Surrey seats in the next House of Commons, thanks to redistribution. Surrey continues to grow and the number of MPs seats does as well.
Fleetwood-Port Kells is currently held by Conservative MP Nina Grewal, who is seeking re-election after winning the past four elections. She has usually won by comfortable margins, but never by a landslide. The demographics of the riding (and indeed all Surrey ridings) are changing, and the change in electoral boundaries likely benefits the NDP. The new riding loses some areas to the east and south, which were likely stronger Conservative territories, and gains a little bit of area from Surrey North, won by the NDP in 2011.
In 2011, Grewal won easily over NDP challenger Nao Fernando, by more than 7,000 votes.
In 2008, she won over Liberal Brenda Locke by just under 9,000 votes. But in 2006, the year the Conservatives won a minority government, she beat Locke by less than 1,000 votes, with independent Jack Cook, who fought an unusual but very interesting campaign, winning 3,202 votes and clearly siphoning away some of her support.
Her first win in 2004 was by about 2,500 votes over Liberal Gulzar Cheema, who had been a Liberal MLA and cabinet minister when the BC Liberals were elected as provincial government in 2001.
The NDP share of the vote in the riding in 2011 was much higher than in previous elections, partly due to the interest in Jack Layton and partly due to a shift away from the Liberals, who finished a distant third with less than half the vote of the NDP.
Begg was a longtime RCMP officer. He held a senior position in the Surrey detachment before retiring, and crime and the need for more RCMP officers to come to the streets of Surrey has been a very hot topic in the past few months. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and other NDP MPs, notably Jinny Sims in Newton-North Delta and Jasbir Sandhu in Surrey North, have been vocal in criticizing the Conservatives for not allocating new RCMP officers here quickly enough.
He will bring practical operating experience as a Surrey police officer to the campaign, at a time when the NDP are doing very well nationally and are poised to almost certainly win more seats in B.C.
Fleetwood-Port Kells could be one of them.

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