Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Chicoutimi—Le Fjord

The Saguenay Fjord cuts more than a hundred kilometres inland from the St. Lawrence, and this riding follows its upper reach. The seat combined the northern part of the Chicoutimi borough and all of the La Baie borough within the amalgamated city of Saguenay with a string of small municipalities along the fjord — Ferland-et-Boilleau, Saint-Félix-d'Otis, Rivière-Éternité, Petit-Saguenay and L'Anse-Saint-Jean — together with the unorganised land behind them.

Candidates

Robert Bouchard (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Saint-Edmond-les-Plaines in March 1943, Bouchard took a bachelor's degree in recreation at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and a master's in public administration at the École nationale d'administration publique. He ran recreation services for the former city of Chicoutimi and served as president of the Carnaval souvenir de Chicoutimi. Elected in 2004 in succession to André Harvey and returned in 2006, he spoke for the Bloc on industry, small business and tourism and sat on the Standing Committee on National Defence. He was seeking a third term.

Jean-Guy Maltais (Conservative) — Maltais, of Chicoutimi, was the Conservative candidate.

Marc Pettersen (Liberal) — Pettersen, also of Chicoutimi, ran for the Liberals.

Stéphane Girard (NDP) — Girard stood for the New Democrats.

Jean-François Veilleux (Green) — Veilleux carried the Green Party's nomination.

About the Riding

Saguenay became a single city in 2002, absorbing Chicoutimi, Jonquière and La Baie along with smaller neighbours; this seat takes in La Baie whole and Chicoutimi in part. La Baie, itself a 1976 merger of Bagotville, Port-Alfred and the parishes of Saint-Alphonse-de-Bagotville and Saint-Alexis-de-Grande-Baie, counted 19,639 residents at the 2006 census and had been losing population for the better part of two decades.

Industry there had been through a punishing stretch. Abitibi-Consolidated idled the Port-Alfred paper mill on 10 December 2003 and closed it permanently the following month, ending 640 jobs; the plant was demolished in 2006. The heavy industry that remains is aluminum. The Grande-Baie smelter, inaugurated in September 1981 and run by Rio Tinto Alcan, employed roughly 680 people and produced about 196,000 tonnes a year. The Grande-Anse marine terminal, built in 1986 to move port traffic onto deep water, handles the region's bulk exports, and a new quay in the Bagotville sector took its first cruise ship, the Eurodam, on 29 September 2008, a fortnight before the election. National Defence is the other large employer: 3 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Bagotville, home to CF-18 fighter squadrons, lies within the La Baie borough.

Rivière-Éternité is the land gateway to the Saguenay fjord park, where Cap Trinité rises straight out of the water; L'Anse-Saint-Jean and Petit-Saguenay live on forestry, outfitting and summer visitors. Since 1998 the water itself has been protected by the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park, managed jointly by the federal and Quebec governments. Memory of the July 1996 flood remains close: 260 millimetres of rain over about three days breached the dike holding Lac Ha! Ha!, and the water tore down the valley from Ferland-et-Boilleau through Grande-Baie. The Ha! Ha! Pyramid, built in 1998 and unveiled in 2000, commemorates it.

The riding is francophone almost to the exclusion of anything else. The federal questions that mattered locally in 2008 were the ones the region had been putting to Ottawa for years: employment insurance rules suited to seasonal and forestry work, help for an aluminum sector exposed to world prices and a strong dollar, the terms of the softwood lumber settlement, and the future of the flying squadrons at Bagotville. The Conservatives had taken the neighbouring seats of Jonquière—Alma in 2006 and Roberval—Lac-Saint-Jean in a 2007 by-election, making Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean one of the few corners of Quebec where the party had built a base.