Jonquière—Alma, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Jonquière—Alma

Two industrial towns anchor this Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean district: the Jonquière borough of the amalgamated city of Saguenay, and Alma, at the point where Lac Saint-Jean drains into the Saguenay River system. Smaller municipalities including Bégin, Larouche, Saint-Ambroise, Saint-Charles-de-Bourget and Saint-David-de-Falardeau fill the space between them, across roughly 1,500 square kilometres of boreal country holding just under 100,000 people. The seat was assembled in 2003 out of the old Jonquière and Lac-Saint-Jean—Saguenay ridings.

Candidates

Jean-Pierre Blackburn (Conservative) — Born in Jonquière in 1948, Blackburn holds a bachelor's degree in administration and a master's in regional studies from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, and ran a communications firm between his periods in office. He was first sent to Ottawa in the 1984 Progressive Conservative sweep and represented Jonquière until 1993; the area returned Bloc Québécois members for the twelve years that followed. His comeback in 2006 gave the Conservatives one of their few footholds in Quebec, and Stephen Harper immediately made him Minister of Labour and minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, the two portfolios he still held when the writs were issued.

Chantale Bouchard (Bloc Québécois) — A lawyer, Bouchard was chosen as the Bloc Québécois candidate in the opening days of September 2008, just as the election was called.

Marc Dupéré (Liberal) and Jean-François Paradis (NDP) also contested the seat.

About the Riding

Aluminum built this place and still runs through it. Arvida, now part of Jonquière, was laid out in the mid-1920s as a planned company town around what grew into one of the largest smelting complexes in the world; a far newer smelter at Alma started up in October 2000 after a construction programme that briefly made the region the biggest building site in North America. Both passed to Rio Tinto when the Anglo-Australian miner bought Alcan in 2007, and the new owner's intentions for the ageing Arvida potlines were a standing subject of local anxiety.

Pulp and paper is the other historic pillar. The Kénogami mill in Jonquière has been making paper since 1912, and Alma has a mill of its own; both were operating under AbitibiBowater following the 2007 merger of Abitibi-Consolidated and Bowater. Between them the two sectors account for thousands of unionised jobs, which is why aluminum and newsprint prices are read here as local political news. The financial turmoil that broke during the campaign, and the commodity slide that came with it, arrived at exactly the wrong moment for a region already worried about mill capacity. Alma's growth owed as much to hydroelectricity as to metal — the generating stations on the Grande Décharge gave the town cheap power and drew the industry that followed.

Beyond the plants, the riding takes in the farm belt on the Lac Saint-Jean lowlands, forestry operations to the north and east, and a tourism trade built on the Saguenay fjord and the surrounding wilderness. The Cégep de Jonquière is the largest college in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, with roughly 3,000 students and a media school — the province's only art et technologie des médias programme — that supplies television, radio and journalism workers across Quebec. With a sitting minister defending the seat and the Bloc Québécois well established across the region, the 2008 contest here was framed from the outset as a two-way fight.