Random—Burin—St. George's, NL — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Random—Burin—St. George's

No Newfoundland riding was more scattered. Across roughly 34,000 square kilometres it began at Random Island and Clarenville on the west side of Trinity Bay, ran the length of the Burin Peninsula, followed the south coast west past Ramea, and finished at Stephenville and Channel-Port aux Basques in the island's southwestern corner. Brunette, Merasheen and Red islands lay inside it, along with more than a hundred small coastal settlements. The 2003 redistribution built it mainly out of Burin—St. George's, stringing together regional economies that had little day-to-day contact with one another.

Candidates

Judy Foote (Liberal) — Foote was contesting an open seat after eleven years in the House of Assembly. Born in Grand Bank in 1952, she took an honours diploma in radio and television broadcast arts at Lambton College and worked in television journalism before running Memorial University's external relations division and joining Premier Clyde Wells's office as communications director in 1989. She lost the provincial district of Grand Bank to Bill Matthews in 1993 and took it in the 1996 general election, holding it through a 2003 contest settled by a recount at 43 votes. Her portfolios were development and rural renewal, industry and trade, and education. She won the federal nomination in 2007 against the former cabinet minister Oliver Langdon and the businessman Roger Jamieson, and left the legislature at that autumn's provincial election.

Terry White (NDP) — White was a carpenter living in Stephenville.

Herb Davis (Conservative) — Davis worked as a policy adviser and lived in Gatineau, Quebec.

Kaitlin Wainwright, a student based in Ottawa, completed the ballot for the Green Party.

About the Riding

The retiring member was Bill Matthews, who had sat for the area since 1997 — as a Progressive Conservative until 1999 and a Liberal afterwards — following fourteen years as the Progressive Conservative member for Grand Bank in the House of Assembly. In March 2007 he called the prime minister a liar; Speaker Peter Milliken declined to expel him from the chamber but did not recognise him to speak again for the remaining fourteen months of his career.

Stephenville, with 6,588 residents in 2006, had been absorbing hard news for a generation. The town was made almost overnight by Ernest Harmon Air Force Base, which the Americans ran from 1941 to 1966 and which lifted a settlement of under a thousand to nearly 6,000 people by 1951. Abitibi-Consolidated announced on 27 July 2005 that it would stop making newsprint there, ending about 300 full- and part-time jobs. What remained was a hospital opened in 2003, the headquarters of the College of the North Atlantic, government offices and the former military airfield.

Channel-Port aux Basques (4,319 in 2006) is the island's front door. Term 32 of the 1949 Terms of Union commits Canada to the ferry across the Cabot Strait to North Sydney, so schedules, rates and the age of Marine Atlantic's fleet were straightforwardly federal matters here.

On the Burin Peninsula, Marystown (5,436) held both of the region's big employers. The shipyard opened in 1967, built with federal and provincial money and run at the outset by Canadian Vickers; it passed through several owners and had been Kiewit's since 2002, its workload rising and falling with offshore fabrication contracts. The fish plant had gone to Ocean Choice International in 2007, when Fishery Products International's Newfoundland operations were broken up and sold, and plant workers in Marystown, Fortune and Grand Bank watched processing decisions closely. At the eastern end, Clarenville (5,274) had grown into a service town for some 96,000 people in 90 communities within a hundred kilometres.