Lévis—Bellechasse, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Lévis—Bellechasse

Two different Quebecs shared this seat on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, across the river from Quebec City. Its northern end covered the eastern part of the city of Lévis — Vieux-Lévis, Lauzon, Saint-Romuald and Pintendre — and the rest ran southeast through the farms and villages of the Bellechasse regional county municipality toward the Appalachian foothills.

Candidates

Steven Blaney (Conservative) — Blaney was defending a first term. Born in Sherbrooke in 1965 and an engineer by training, he had worked in water treatment and energy efficiency and run an environmental technology business before entering politics, and he took the riding from Bloc Québécois MP Réal Lapierre in the Conservative breakthrough of January 2006. From the end of May 2007 he chaired the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages, and he ran on that record and on federal money delivered to the region.

Guy Bergeron (Bloc Québécois) — A political scientist from Quebec City, Bergeron carried the Bloc banner in a riding the party had held from its creation in 2004 until Blaney's win two years later.

Pauline Côté (Liberal) — Côté ran for the Liberals, who had not been competitive in this stretch of Chaudière-Appalaches for some time.

Gabriel Biron (New Democratic Party) — Biron stood for the NDP, which was slowly assembling an organization in the ridings around Quebec City.

Lynne Champoux-Williams (Green Party) — Champoux-Williams, from Saint-Nicolas, was the Green candidate.

Normand Fournier ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Lévis, reassembled out of a dozen municipalities in 2002, gave the riding its population centre. The Desjardins Group, founded in the town in 1900 by Alphonse Desjardins and still headquartered there, was the region's most recognizable institution and among its largest employers.

The Davie shipyard in the Lauzon sector was the perennial local story. Canada's oldest yard, with roots reaching back to 1825, it had been in bankruptcy since 2001 before its assets were bought in 2006 by the Norwegian group Teco and the business relaunched as Davie Yards, with plans to build jack-up drilling rigs and talk of restoring something close to a thousand jobs. Going into the vote that recovery was promised rather than delivered, and the yard's order book and financing looked more precarious as credit markets seized up through September and October 2008.

Inland, Bellechasse ran on farming and a handful of substantial manufacturers. Dairy herds, hog barns and poultry operations covered the country around Saint-Anselme, Sainte-Claire, Saint-Damien-de-Buckland and Saint-Lazare-de-Bellechasse. Sainte-Claire has built intercity coaches since Eugène Prévost founded the firm there in 1924; wholly owned by the Volvo group since 2004, it remained one of the largest industrial employers in the countryside south of Lévis. Hog producers across the region were losing money on every animal as feed costs climbed, and farm groups spent the campaign pressing both Ottawa and Quebec City for support.

The riding was almost entirely francophone. Its federal politics since 2004 had been a straight Conservative–Bloc argument, and the Bloc spent the campaign attacking the government's record on culture, on agriculture and on the mission in Afghanistan.