Fundy Royal, NB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Fundy Royal

Since 1917 this seat and its predecessors have sent a Conservative — or a member of a party the Conservatives later absorbed — to Ottawa at every general election but one, the exception being Paul Zed's Liberal win in 1993. The riding fills the interior between Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton. It runs from Quispamsis and the Kingston Peninsula through Hampton and Norton to Sussex, east to Petitcodiac and Salisbury, and south across Albert County to the Fundy shore at St. Martins and Alma.

Candidates

Rob Moore (Conservative) — Moore was the sitting member, elected in 2004 and again in 2006, and had served since February 2006 as parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice and attorney general. Born in Gander in May 1974, the son of a Pentecostal minister, he spent much of his childhood in New York State and Pennsylvania as his father's work moved the family, then finished at Kennebecasis Valley High School in 1992. He holds a business administration degree and a law degree from the University of New Brunswick and was admitted to the provincial bar in June 2000. He had run once before, standing for the Canadian Alliance in the old Fundy—Royal riding in 2000 and finishing third.

Rob Moir (NDP) — Moir was an associate professor of economics at the University of New Brunswick's Saint John campus, where he had taught since 1996, and lived at Clifton Royal on the Kingston Peninsula. He had carried the New Democratic banner here in 2006 and returned with a detailed set of regional proposals: an energy park built around stranded natural gas, a passenger rail link from Moncton to Saint John with a hub near Sussex, federal limits on raw-log exports, high-efficiency wood-heat conversions for the province's electrically heated houses, and a full federal panel review of refinery emissions.

Mark Wright (Liberal) — Wright, a sales representative from Sussex, took the Liberal nomination.

Erik Matthew Millett (Green Party) — Millett lived at Hampton and was principal of Belleisle Elementary School.

About the Riding

Two economies coexist here. Quispamsis and the upper Kennebecasis Valley function as suburbs of Saint John, emptying toward the port city on weekday mornings while their tax base and school enrolment stay in Kings County. Inland the character changes. Sussex calls itself Dairytown, with the herds, the processing plants and a weekly livestock auction to support the claim, and beneath the surrounding countryside sits one of the largest potash deposits in the world. Mining began at Penobsquis, east of the town, in 1983, and PotashCorp took over the operation a decade later. In July 2007 the company committed roughly $1.7 billion to a new mine and mill nearby at Picadilly, designed for close to 1.8 million tonnes a year. Construction started in 2008, with Premier Shawn Graham promoting it as a source of hundreds of direct and spin-off jobs. In a riding used to watching young workers leave for Alberta, a construction site on that scale was the economic story of the year.

The Fundy coast supplies a second income stream. Fundy National Park at Alma, the shoreline at St. Martins and the tides themselves draw visitors through the summer. Agriculture, woodlots and small manufacturing fill in the rest, with Salisbury and Petitcodiac in the east oriented toward Moncton. Federal questions in 2008 ran to rural infrastructure, employment insurance for seasonal work, the softwood lumber regime, and — as the last weeks of the campaign coincided with the seizing up of credit markets — the outlook for resource investment in the region.