Egmont, PE — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Egmont

Egmont went into the 2008 campaign with no incumbent on the ballot. Joe McGuire, the Liberal member since 1988, had announced in March 2007 that he would not run again. The party's replacement nominee, Robert Morrissey, had won a contested nomination in November 2007 but withdrew on 5 August 2008, saying that opportunities in the private sector had made his candidacy untenable. Keith Milligan, whom Morrissey had beaten for the nomination, was acclaimed in his place on 5 September, two days before the election was called.

Candidates

Gail Shea (Conservative) — Born at Skinners Pond in 1959, Shea worked as a bookkeeper and for the Canada Revenue Agency before winning the provincial district of Tignish-DeBlois in 2000. She spent seven years in the legislature under Premier Pat Binns, serving as minister of community and cultural affairs from 2000 to 2003 and then as minister of transportation and public works until 2007, a portfolio in which she oversaw the introduction of graduated driver licensing. She left provincial politics in 2007 and took the federal Conservative nomination that December.

Keith Milligan (Liberal) — Milligan sat for Cascumpec-Grand River in the Legislative Assembly from a 1981 by-election until 2000, holding the health and social services, agriculture, education, and transportation portfolios in successive Liberal governments. He won the party leadership in October 1996 and served about seven weeks as premier before the Progressive Conservatives took power in that November's provincial election. A teacher by training, he had also worked as an elk farmer and silver fox rancher and lived at Tyne Valley.

Orville Lewis (NDP) — A farmer from Woodstock, Lewis ran for the New Democrats in a riding where the party had never been a serious federal contender.

Rebecca Ridlington (Green Party) — A supply teacher with the Western School Board, based in Summerside, Ridlington completed the Green Party's Island slate.

About the Riding

Egmont covered 1,527 square kilometres and about 34,800 people: Summerside, the Sherbrooke community, and every one of the first seventeen townships of Prince County, along with Lennox Island. Its communities run from Miscouche, Wellington and Abram-Village in the Acadian Evangeline area out through O'Leary, Alberton and Tignish to the fishing harbours at North Cape. The concentration of French speakers gives the riding a bilingual character no other Island seat has.

The western economy rests on farming, fishing and aerospace. Prince County is potato country, and Prince Edward Island grows more potatoes than any other province; lobster, oysters and Irish moss support the coastal villages. Summerside absorbed the loss of Canadian Forces Base Summerside, announced in the 1989 federal budget and completed on 1 April 1992, which stripped more than a thousand jobs out of a city of about fifteen thousand. The base lands passed to Slemon Park Corporation, where an aircraft engine overhaul business that opened as Atlantic Turbines in 1991 had grown into a Vector Aerospace operation employing several hundred people, and where Testori Americas, on the Island since 1994, builds interiors for aircraft and transit vehicles. Ottawa also placed a tax processing centre in Summerside as part of the response to the closure.

At North Cape, the wind farm built by the provincially owned PEI Energy Corporation and the interpretive centre beside it had turned the Island's northwestern tip into a modest draw for visitors and a symbol of the province's push into wind generation.

Egmont had returned a Liberal at every election since 1980. The Conservative campaign rested on Shea's provincial record and her name recognition through Prince County rather than on any shift in the riding's habits.