The Division of Canning is an Australian Electoral Division in Western Australia. The division was created in 1949 and is named for Alfred Canning, the Western Australian government surveyor who surveyed the Canning Stock Route. It was originally a country seat that traded hands between the two main centre-right parties, the Country and Liberal parties. Since 1980 it has been located in the southern suburbs of the two largest cities in Western Australia, Perth and Mandurah. For most of its last three decades, it has been a highly marginal seat due to the balanced proportion of the urban north and the rural south, changing hands between the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party. Canning had a Liberal margin of 4.3 percent leading into the 2010 election, and was targeted by Labor, who stood high-profile candidate and former state Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan.