Beauséjour, NB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Beauséjour

Beauséjour wraps around the eastern and southern edges of Moncton and then follows the Northumberland Strait north through its beach towns. It takes in eastern Westmorland County, including the outer parts of Dieppe, and a large share of Kent County, running from the Tantramar marshes at the Nova Scotia line up the coast through Shediac, Cap-Pelé, Bouctouche and Richibucto to Saint-Louis-de-Kent.

Candidates

Dominic LeBlanc (Liberal) — LeBlanc was born in Ottawa in 1967, the son of Roméo LeBlanc, and grew up between the capital and southeastern New Brunswick. He read political science at Trinity College in Toronto, took law degrees at the University of New Brunswick and Harvard, advised Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from 1993 to 1996, and practised in Shediac and Moncton. He lost Beauséjour in 1997 and won it in 2000. He was parliamentary secretary for national defence in 2003, and in the Parliament just ended sat on the Commons committees for international trade, for justice and human rights, and for procedure and House affairs. He lived at Grande-Digue and was seeking a fourth term.

Omer Leger (Conservative) — Leger was born at Gardner, Massachusetts in 1931, educated at St. Joseph's College in Memramcook, and worked as an administrator for the Assomption insurance company. He won a 1971 provincial by-election in Kent — the first Progressive Conservative elected in that traditionally Liberal county in nearly six decades — and served in Richard Hatfield's cabinet as provincial secretary, then as minister of fisheries and later of tourism, sitting on and off in the Legislative Assembly until 1987. He had carried the Conservative banner in Beauséjour federally in 1988 and again in 2006.

Chris Durrant (NDP) — Durrant was a student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, where he co-edited the campus newspaper, The Argosy.

Michael Milligan (Green) — Milligan, an entrepreneur from Shediac River, was the interim provincial representative of the Green Party of New Brunswick, which had been established that May.

About the Riding

About 76,000 people lived in Beauséjour in 2006. The riding is predominantly Acadian, with a substantial anglophone population at the Sackville and Port Elgin end, and its politics are shaped by that mix and by an economy in which most of the work is tied to a season.

The coast is the engine. Shediac is the region's summer capital and the centre of a lobster industry supporting harvesters, buyers and processors along the strait. At Cap-Pelé the village's smokehouses — a trade Acadian families here have practised since the 1840s — turn out the overwhelming majority of Canada's smoked herring. Oyster leases, crab and shellfish plants and inshore fleets work from Grande-Digue north through Saint-Louis-de-Kent and Richibucto.

Inland the picture changes. Dieppe, whose outer edges fall inside the riding, grew 25.6% between the 2001 and 2006 censuses, the fastest rate of any New Brunswick municipality of its size, absorbing the spillover from Greater Moncton. Sackville is a university town, home to Mount Allison, on the main road and rail links into Nova Scotia; the shortwave relay station out on the Tantramar marshes had carried Radio Canada International's signal abroad since the Second World War and leased its spare transmitter time to broadcasters from several other countries. Dorchester Penitentiary, opened in 1880 and the second-oldest federal prison still operating in Canada, is a significant employer at the riding's southern end.

History is close to the surface. Fort Beauséjour at Aulac, which gives the riding its name, stands on the isthmus where the deportation of the Acadians began in 1755, and at Cape Jourimain the Confederation Bridge leaves New Brunswick for Prince Edward Island. Elsipogtog First Nation, on the Richibucto River southwest of Rexton, is the largest First Nation community in the province, and housing, fisheries access and treaty rights form part of the riding's federal agenda.

The concerns raised in October 2008 were the ones a seasonal economy always brings: employment insurance eligibility, fuel prices, the state of the inshore fishery, and whether the turmoil in world credit markets would reach the wharves of the strait.