St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

St. John's South—Mount Pearl

This riding held the oldest part of the capital together with its largest postwar suburb. Under the boundaries in force in 2008 it took the southern half of the City of St. John's — the harbour and the narrow streets above it, the Battery, Signal Hill, Quidi Vidi, Georgestown, the Southside, Shea Heights, the Waterford valley, Kilbride and the farmland of the Goulds — and added the separate City of Mount Pearl and the fishing town of Petty Harbour—Maddox Cove below Cape Spear.

Candidates

Siobhan Coady (Liberal) — Coady was making her third attempt at the seat, having lost to Loyola Hearn in 2004 and 2006. Born in Grand Falls-Windsor on 11 November 1960 and raised in St. John's, she holds an education degree from Memorial University and an accreditation in public relations. She was president and chief executive of Newfound Genomics, The Clinical Trials Centre and Bonaventure Fisheries, led the St. John's Board of Trade in 1993 and chaired the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

Ryan Cleary (NDP) — Cleary was among the best-known journalists in the province. Born in Gander on 20 November 1966 and raised in Riverhead, Harbour Grace and Bay Roberts, he finished the journalism programme at the College of the North Atlantic's Stephenville campus in 1989. He was a fisheries reporter at The Telegram in 1992 when the northern cod moratorium came down, then edited the weekly Independent, hosted the VOCM call-in programme Nightline and worked for NTV. His columns had argued that the province got a poor deal within Confederation. He entered the race late.

Merv Wiseman (Conservative) — Wiseman was a maritime search and rescue coordinator from North Harbour on Placentia Bay.

Ted Warren stood for the Greens, Greg Byrne for the Newfoundland and Labrador First Party and Terry Christopher Butler as an independent.

About the Riding

The seat came open very late. Loyola Hearn, born at Renews on the Southern Shore in 1943, had sat in the House of Assembly for St. Mary's—The Capes from 1982 to 1993 and served as provincial minister of education; he entered the Commons at a by-election in St. John's West on 15 May 2000 and was named Minister of Fisheries and Oceans on 6 February 2006. Days before Parliament was dissolved in September 2008 he announced that he would not run again, leaving the Conservatives here without an incumbent and without a minister just as Premier Danny Williams's campaign against the party was getting under way.

The harbour is the riding's oldest asset and still a working one. Supply vessels for the Grand Banks platforms shared it with fishing boats, container traffic and cruise ships, and the law firms, banks, insurers and government offices on the streets climbing away from it employed a large share of the province's professional workforce.

Mount Pearl had 24,671 residents in 2006, second only to St. John's among the province's municipalities. Boxed in by St. John's on three sides and Paradise on the fourth, it had run out of undeveloped land and turned to denser planning, while its commercial and industrial districts — Donovans chief among them — supplied much of the metropolitan area's warehousing, distribution and light manufacturing. The Goulds remained the region's market-garden and dairy district, and Petty Harbour—Maddox Cove kept a small inshore fleet and a steady stream of day visitors.

By 2008 the pull on all of it was the onshore end of the offshore: supply bases, engineering firms and operator headquarters. That sector explains why household incomes here had risen through the decade, and why the financial turmoil of September and October 2008, and the sharp fall in oil prices with it, registered faster than in most of the province.