New Brunswick Southwest, NB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

New Brunswick Southwest

The international boundary shapes this riding more than any provincial one. New Brunswick Southwest takes in all of Charlotte County — the St. Croix border towns of St. Stephen and St. Andrews, the harbours at St. George and Blacks Harbour, and the Fundy Isles of Deer Island, Campobello and Grand Manan — along with inland stretches of York, Sunbury, Queens, Kings and Saint John counties that bring in McAdam, Harvey, Fredericton Junction, Grand Bay—Westfield and the country around Belleisle Bay. The 2003 redistribution that drew these lines first called the seat St. Croix—Belleisle, restoring the present name a year later. Roughly 94% of residents report English as a mother tongue, the highest share of any riding in the province.

Candidates

Greg Thompson (Conservative) — Thompson went into the campaign as both the riding's member and the minister of veterans affairs, appointed by Stephen Harper on 6 February 2006. Born in St. Stephen in March 1947, he taught history at Fundy High School from 1975 to 1980 before moving into business. He was first elected in 1988 as a Progressive Conservative in Carleton—Charlotte, lost the seat in 1993, returned in 1997, held the area through successive boundary changes and joined the Conservative Party of Canada after the 2003 merger. As minister he stood with the prime minister on 3 April 2007 to announce a veterans' bill of rights and a veterans ombudsman.

Nancy MacIntosh (Liberal) — MacIntosh, a political adviser from Hanwell, carried the Liberal nomination against a sitting cabinet minister.

Andrew Graham (NDP) — Graham was a woodworker and carpenter from Saint John who had stood for the New Democrats in the riding in 2006.

Robert Wayne Boucher (Green Party) — Boucher, an information technology security specialist from Harvey in York County, was the Green Party candidate.

About the Riding

Salt water carries the economy. Salmon aquaculture had grown from nothing into one of the county's largest private employers: the Cooke family started at Blacks Harbour in 1985 with a single marine site holding 5,000 fish, and by 2008 ran hatcheries, sea cages and processing plants along the Fundy coast from that base. In the same village the Connors brothers had been canning sardines since the 1880s, and Connors Bros. remained one of the province's significant seafood processors. Blacks Harbour is also the mainland terminus of the year-round ferry to Grand Manan, largest of the Fundy Isles, which lives on lobster, herring, scallops and summer visitors.

Upriver, the border runs down the middle of a single community. St. Stephen and Calais, Maine, keep an automatic fire-aid agreement and share a week-long festival every summer. Ganong Bros. has made confectionery in the town since 1873; a chocolate museum opened in the old factory in 1999 and the town took the name Canada's Chocolate Town the year after. Congestion at the existing bridges had grown bad enough that work began in 2008 on a third international crossing to route commercial trucks clear of both downtowns. Downriver, St. Andrews runs on heritage tourism and marine science.

Inland the riding is thinly settled, with forestry, small sawmills and farming supporting villages strung along the highways and the rail line at McAdam, while Grand Bay—Westfield at the eastern edge is effectively a Saint John suburb. On the coast between them, NB Power took the Point Lepreau nuclear station offline at the end of March 2008 for an eighteen-month, $1.4-billion refurbishment, drawing a large contractor workforce into the area. Fisheries and aquaculture regulation, border infrastructure, the state of the forest sector, and veterans' benefits — an issue with a direct line to the sitting member's portfolio — framed the federal argument in this corner of the province.