Alberta election race in Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo

Stephen Drover parks beside a bus stop in the Timberlea neighbourhood on a frigid April morning.  

The sun isn't up yet.

The NDP candidate for Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo jumps out of his pickup and pulls a carton of soft drinks from the truck bed.  

He strides towards two men standing under a street lamp, introduces himself and hands each of them a can of Orange Crush, the impromptu symbol of the Alberta NDP campaign.

"Throw that in your lunch bag for later," he tells them.

Robert Changirwa and Lazaro Besanang slide the cans into their knapsacks. Drover launches into his spiel. The motorcoach that will take the two men to the Shell Albion Sands site is scheduled to arrive within minutes. Drover knows it.  He's already planned his route.

He runs through how the PCs aren't funding new students. He moves onto the delays in twinning Highway 63. He talks about the 100 babies born each month in Fort McMurray, and how PC cuts will hurt health care.

"You need to keep the promises if I elect you," Changirwa says. When Drover says he will, Changirwa nods.

"That's good, man. We want action."

The bus pulls up and the two men wave goodbye. Drover moves on to the next stop, to meet more workers, who wait for buses that snake quietly through residential neighbourhoods each day, bound for Syncrude, Suncor and Shell.

"At 4:25 and 6:45 a.m. we have thousands of people who are heading out to site," Drover says. "So every 15 minutes at this bus stop, will be somebody new. So really, it's just planning a route, driving around for two and a half hours."

• Watch NDP candidate Stephen Drover hand out cans of Orange Crush

A plant operator at Suncor, Drover rides those buses himself. On work days, he gets up at 3:40 a.m., canvasses the stops until 6 a.m., then gets on his own bus at 6:40, only to return home 14½ hours later.

It's exhausting but Drover sees it as the only way to combat low voter turnout in his city, which sat at 34 per cent in the 2012 election. Provincially, the turnout was 54.4 per cent.

Despite mixed reactions from the workers he meets, Drover plans to keep up his strategy until election day.

"A lot of times the guys here feel like they're the forgotten people," he says. "They're not going to meetings. They're not getting out to see the candidates. You have to go to see where they are. That's what I do."​

Willow Square fight

Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo has been Tory territory since 1997, when Liberal Adam Germain was defeated by former mayor Guy Boutilier.

Boutilier represented the riding as a PC until 2009, when he was kicked out of the party. He crossed to the Wildrose a year later and ran under that banner in 2012. But he was unseated by Tory candidate Mike Allen, a local businessman and a former Wood Buffalo municipal councillor.

Allen had his share of troubles in his first term. In 2013, he was caught in an undercover prostitution sting while on government business in Minnesota. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was allowed back into the PC caucus last year.

Allen is now running for a second term after winning a contested nomination.

He calls what happened in 2013 "the most challenging time" of his life.

"I've put it behind me and have moved on," he says. "The vast majority of my constituents have. It's very rare for me to get a response at the door ... I think in the last two and a half weeks I've had two people bring it up."

Allen is more comfortable talking about the twinning of Highway 63 and the controversy over the Willow Square site in downtown Fort McMurray, which is in his riding.

Wildrose Leader Brian Jean, a former Conservative MP, is running in Fort McMurray-Conklin against incumbent Don Scott. Jean blames Allen, Scott and the PC government for inaction on both fronts.

Willow Square, in particular, has become a sore point in the campaign.

Jean says the site across from the Northern Lights Hospital was always intended to be a long-term care facility. He accuses the PCs of delaying the project, only to build it out in Parsons Creek.

Allen calls Jean's accusation a "typical partisan response," and suggests Jean may be to blame.

"Whether or not it's Brian's inability to get the job done, or [Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's] inability to want to work with it, I can't say," he says. "All I know is that it was within 100 days of Jim Prentice becoming premier of this province that we were able to get an agreement with the federal government."

Allen says Willow Square was supposed to be used for social housing. The idea of a long-term care facility was floated but later rejected, because the site was too small for a single-storey building.

"There have been, for many reasons, including political reasons, a lot of accusations being thrown around and a lot of misunderstandings that have developed as result of some individuals just trying to promote their own agendas," he says.

Highway 63 an issue for paramedic

For Tany Yao, his political agenda is partly motivated by personal reasons. Yao is running for the Wildrose in Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo, and shares a downtown campaign office with Jean. He has lived in the city since the late 1970s and works as a paramedic.

Willow Square makes him angry. As does the slow pace of twinning Highway 63. Yao says he has responded to many collisions on the so-called "Highway of Death."

His voice quivers with anger when he tells a story about two PC MLAs who happened to be driving the highway in 2006, when they came across a collision Yao responded to.

"Well, finally. Here's the politicians. They're on an accident of ours. They're seeing the pain, the misery," he recounts.

"I thought, finally, we're going to get this thing twinned and - nothing. Nothing happened then."

Yao acknowledges voter turnout is a problem in Fort McMurray. He has been door-knocking, trying to get the message out..

He believes a change in government would be good for Fort McMurray, to stop what he calls reactive policies that have hurt the community, including the failure to release Crown land for housing development.

"I have faith," he says. "I have faith that if people really want to see change, if they want to see some support for Fort McMurray, that they will come out and support me and Brian, and that they will get out and vote."

Stephen Drover hopes his efforts can motivate people to vote NDP.

He started canvassing the bus routes in February after receiving the NDP nomination. He gave out coffee back then, something he says was appreciated when the temperatures dropped to minus 46 C.

"You appreciated the coffee as a hot pocket to keep you warm," he laughs.

The Liberals are running a candidate in Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo, Robin LeFevre.