Acadie—Bathurst, NB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Acadie—Bathurst

Few Canadian ridings have had their boundaries settled in court. Acadie—Bathurst has. The 2003 redistribution moved several francophone parishes, Allardville among them, out of the seat and into neighbouring Miramichi. Residents challenged the change, and in May 2004 the Federal Court held in Raîche v. Canada that the boundaries commission had failed to weigh community of interest properly, and declared the two districts' boundaries invalid. A commission of inquiry appointed that October recommended putting the parishes back, and Parliament gave effect to the recommendation in legislation that received royal assent in February 2005. The riding that voted in 2008 therefore covered most of Gloucester County — the Acadian Peninsula, the city of Bathurst, and the villages along the Chaleur Bay shore.

Candidates

Yvon Godin (NDP) — Godin spent his working life underground and at the bargaining table. He was employed at Brunswick Mine, served as president of the United Steelworkers local there from 1982 to 1988 and as a union representative until 1997, the year local anger at the Liberal government's rewriting of employment insurance carried him into the Commons over the sitting Liberal cabinet minister, Doug Young. He had since served as his party's whip and as its critic for employment insurance and official languages, and no file occupied him more than the treatment of seasonal workers under EI. A founding member of the Allardville fire brigade and a former president of that community's local service district, he was seeking a fifth term.

Odette Robichaud (Liberal) — Robichaud, a court stenographer from Inkerman Ferry, was the Liberal candidate in a riding her party had held until Godin's breakthrough.

Jean Guy Dubé (Conservative) — Dubé, of Rivière-du-Portage on the peninsula, carried the Conservative nomination.

Michelle Aubin (Green) — Aubin, a legal assistant, stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Just under 79,000 people lived here in 2006, and French is the mother tongue of more than four in five of them — a proportion matched by few ridings anywhere outside Quebec. Official languages policy is not an abstraction in Acadie—Bathurst; the court fight over the riding's own boundaries had turned on precisely that question.

The economy rests on three legs, and in 2008 one of them was visibly failing. Brunswick Mine, in the hills about thirty kilometres southwest of Bathurst, was one of the largest underground zinc and lead operations in the world and employed roughly 900 people, but its ore reserves were running down and closure was then expected around 2010. For a city of Bathurst's size, the loss of those wages and of the contracting work around them was the dominant economic question of the campaign.

Fishing is the second leg and the peninsula's defining industry. Fleets out of Caraquet, Shippagan and Lamèque work snow crab, herring, lobster and shrimp, and the plants that handle the catch are the largest employers in many villages. Peat is the third: about a quarter of Lamèque Island is bog, and peat moss harvested there and around Shippagan is shipped to garden markets across North America and beyond, a trade marked each July by the provincial Peat Moss Festival.

All three are seasonal, which is why employment insurance is the permanent local issue. Short seasons, plant shutdowns and long winters made qualifying weeks and benefit duration the subjects raised most often with candidates, and they had been the making of the sitting member's career.

Beyond the resource economy, forestry works the interior around Allardville and Paquetville, the villages of Beresford, Petit-Rocher, Nigadoo and Pointe-Verte line the coast north of Bathurst, and a tourism trade built on Acadian heritage draws visitors to Caraquet and Grande-Anse. The region had been losing young people to Alberta for years, and the argument about how to keep them was familiar to everyone who heard it.