Labrador, NL — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Labrador

Labrador is a riding of 294,330 square kilometres and roughly 26,000 people — the least populous federal district in the country. It takes in the entire mainland portion of the province, from the Strait of Belle Isle north to the Torngat Mountains, and six Indigenous communities on the north coast have no road connection at all. The riding contains the Inuit self-governing region of Nunatsiavut, the Innu communities of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish, and the southern and central communities then represented by the Labrador Métis Nation.

Candidates

Todd Russell (Liberal) — Russell was the sitting member and lived in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Born in St. Anthony on 22 December 1966 and raised in William's Harbour on the south Labrador coast, he studied at Memorial University and led the Labrador Métis Nation before entering federal politics. He won the seat in a by-election on 24 May 2005 after the death of Lawrence O'Brien, shoring up the Martin government's numbers in a minority Parliament, and held it in 2006. He was the Liberal critic for Aboriginal affairs.

Phyllis Artiss (NDP) — Artiss taught English and women's studies at Memorial University for more than four decades and had worked on Indigenous and women's issues in Labrador. She sat on the provincial New Democratic executive and chaired the party's women's caucus. She lived in St. John's, and running a candidate from the capital here drew criticism during the campaign.

Lacey Lewis (Conservative) — Lewis worked as an office assistant and lived in Ottawa.

Nyssa Christine McLeod (Green) — McLeod was an administrative assistant, also based in Ottawa.

About the Riding

Labrador's wage economy rests on a few very large projects. In the west, Labrador City (7,240 in 2006) and neighbouring Wabush were built by and for the iron ore industry in the 1960s, and the Iron Ore Company of Canada's Carol operation remained the region's employer of record. With steel demand still strong in the first half of 2008, the company approved the opening phase of a staged expansion in March, roughly $475 million meant to lift concentrate output. On the north coast near Nain, the Voisey's Bay nickel deposit had been in production since 2005, bringing industrial employment and the 2002 benefits agreements with the Innu Nation and the Labrador Inuit Association to a part of Labrador that had seen neither.

Happy Valley-Goose Bay (7,572 in 2006) is the administrative and transport centre of central Labrador, linked west by the Trans-Labrador Highway to Churchill Falls and Labrador West and supplied largely by container ship during the June-to-December shipping season. The town grew up around the airfield laid out in 1941, later 5 Wing Goose Bay, which became the principal low-level flying training area for several NATO air forces. The Royal Air Force closed its permanent detachment on 31 March 2005 and the German, Italian and Dutch detachments ended the same year; what Ottawa intended to put in their place was a standing question here. The overflights had also been a long-running grievance for the Innu Nation, which argued they harmed wildlife.

Energy was the other federal file. The generating components of the Lower Churchill development — Gull Island and Muskrat Falls — had been registered for environmental assessment in late 2006, and the terms on which that power might be built and moved to market were already being argued over. Elsewhere the picture was one of distance: fishing, hunting and public-sector work in Nain, Hopedale, Makkovik, Postville and Rigolet, and ferry and air links that dictate the cost of everything.