Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor

Some 27,000 square kilometres of central and northeastern Newfoundland made up this district: the Trans-Canada corridor through Bishop's Falls, Grand Falls-Windsor and Gander; the Notre Dame Bay shore at Botwood, Lewisporte and Twillingate; Fogo Island and Change Islands; and the long arm of the Bonavista Peninsula reaching into the Atlantic. The 2003 redistribution built it mostly out of Gander—Grand Falls, with the balance from Bonavista—Trinity—Conception, welding a mill town, an aviation town and dozens of fishing communities into one riding.

Candidates

Scott Simms (Liberal) — Simms held the seat, having won it when the riding was created in 2004 and again in 2006. Born in Bishop's Falls on 12 August 1969, he took a commerce degree at Mount Allison University and studied broadcast journalism at Loyalist College, then reported for radio stations in Gander and Grand Falls-Windsor. In 1993 he joined The Weather Network, working on air from Montreal and later Toronto until he came home to run in 2004. He was named Liberal critic for fisheries and oceans on 18 January 2006 and carried the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency file from that February until January 2007.

Andrew House (Conservative) — House was a lawyer based in Gander, the riding's aviation and service centre.

Jason Holley (NDP) — Holley was an artist from Amherst Cove, on the Bonavista Peninsula.

Robert Karl O'Connor, a St. John's physician, completed the ballot for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Grand Falls-Windsor, with 13,558 residents in 2006, was built for a single purpose. The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company — formed on 7 January 1905 by the Harmsworth brothers and the railway builder Robert Gillespie Reid — laid out a planned town around a pulp and paper mill that opened in October 1909 and turned out its first roll of saleable newsprint that December. A century later the plant was in trouble. AbitibiBowater had shut one of the two paper machines at the roughly 490-employee mill earlier in 2008 and put a restructuring plan to its unionised workforce in August, and the operation's future was unsettled while the campaign ran. Regional health services and mining in the central interior were already absorbing part of the workforce.

Gander, population 9,951 in 2006, exists because of the great-circle route between New York and London. The site was picked in 1935, construction of the airfield began in 1936, and the first aircraft landed in January 1938. By 2008 the airport, an area control centre, aircraft servicing work and the James Paton Memorial Health Centre supported the town, which also served as the retail and administrative hub for a wide stretch of central Newfoundland.

The Bonavista Peninsula tells a different story. The town of Bonavista, at the end of it, had 3,764 residents in 2006, down from 4,526 a decade earlier — a decline traceable to the 1992 northern cod moratorium. Snow crab and shrimp took up part of the slack, and heritage tourism was growing around restored merchant premises, the lighthouse at the cape and the tradition that John Cabot made landfall there in 1497. Fogo Island, Change Islands and Twillingate faced the same arithmetic: fewer plant shifts and an ageing population.

Across the riding the pattern in 2008 was commuting rather than settlement. Men and women flew west to work in Alberta or offshore, and their wages returned to towns whose own payrolls were shrinking. Forestry policy, the crab and shrimp fisheries and the reach of employment insurance were the questions candidates were pressed on, alongside Premier Danny Williams's province-wide campaign against the federal Conservatives.