Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Abitibi—Témiscamingue

Mining country on the Ontario boundary, and the fifth-largest riding in Quebec by area: 37,483 square kilometres holding 102,795 people at the 2006 census. It took in the regional county municipalities of Abitibi, Abitibi-Ouest and Témiscamingue, the amalgamated city of Rouyn-Noranda, and the farming villages of Villebois, Val-Paradis and Beaucanton in the south-western corner of the Jamésie territory. Rouyn-Noranda was the administrative anchor, with Amos, La Sarre, Ville-Marie, Témiscaming and Barraute the other main centres; Val-d'Or and the rest of the Vallée-de-l'Or lay outside, in the enormous riding to the north. Algonquin communities, among them the Abitibiwinni at Pikogan near Amos, fall within the boundaries.

Candidates

Marc Lemay (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Amos in April 1951, Lemay practised criminal law out of Rouyn-Noranda and had served as bâtonnier of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue bar. He took the seat at the 2004 general election, beating the sitting Liberal, Gilbert Barrette, and was returned in 2006. He was seeking a third term, and went into the campaign as the Bloc's spokesman on Indian Affairs and Northern Development — a file with direct application in a riding holding several Algonquin communities.

Gilbert Barrette (Liberal) — Born at Saint-Eugène-de-Guigues in Témiscamingue in May 1941, Barrette spent his working life in school administration and presided over the Commission scolaire du Lac-Abitibi. He won the former riding of Témiscamingue in a by-election on 16 June 2003 and sat for barely a year before Lemay defeated him in 2004. Retired and living at La Sarre, he was attempting a comeback against the man who had beaten him.

Pierre Grandmaitre (Conservative) — Mayor of Rouyn-Noranda from 1994 to 2001 and latterly a real estate broker, Grandmaitre stood as the Conservative candidate.

Christine Moore (NDP) — A nurse living at Dupuy, north of La Sarre, Moore had spent more than three years in the Canadian Forces, training as a medical technician with the 52nd Field Ambulance at Sherbrooke, before turning to civilian health care and completing a college nursing diploma earlier in 2008. She had first carried the NDP banner here in 2006 and was 24 during this campaign, making her second attempt.

Bruno Côté (Green Party) — An economist living in Quebec City rather than the riding, Côté ran for the Greens.

Ghislain Loiselle, a photojournalist from Rouyn-Noranda, also stood as an independent.

About the Riding

Two resource economies were pulling in opposite directions in the autumn of 2008. Mining was strong. The Horne smelter at Rouyn-Noranda, which had passed to Xstrata in 2006 with the rest of Falconbridge, employed several hundred people and was the world's largest recycler of copper and precious metals from electronic scrap; in January 2008 its owners announced they would double that capacity to 100,000 tonnes a year. East of the city, Agnico-Eagle's LaRonde complex in the Cadillac and Preissac country was the region's principal underground gold operation, reached by the deepest single-lift shaft in the western hemisphere. Metal prices had run high for most of the decade and exploration spending had followed.

Forestry was in the opposite condition. Sawmills had been closing or standing idle across the region since 2005 as American housing starts collapsed and the dollar climbed. Abitibi-Consolidated suspended work indefinitely at Champneuf in the autumn of 2006, one of four mills it shut at once, and the merger that produced AbitibiBowater in October 2007 was followed within months by the removal of roughly a million tonnes of annual newsprint capacity. Softwood lumber, employment insurance for laid-off and seasonal woods workers, and federal help for single-industry towns were live subjects in Barraute, Taschereau, Launay, Belleterre and Témiscaming.

Agriculture persisted in the clay belt around La Sarre and in the Témiscamingue valley, where dairy and field crops occupy the better soils. The Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, whose head office has been at Rouyn-Noranda since 1983, was both the region's university and a substantial employer. With a hundred thousand residents spread across a territory of that size, the reliability and cost of air service, highway maintenance and federal service delivery were perennial complaints, and Indigenous questions — land, housing, policing and resource consultation — carried more weight here than in most Quebec ridings.