Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier

This was the only district in the country where the governing party put no name on the ballot. The Conservatives had contested the seat in 2006, when it went to an independent; in 2008 they stood aside altogether. Spread over 7,617 square kilometres west and north of Quebec City, the riding covers the regional county municipalities of Portneuf and La Jacques-Cartier plus the city of Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, and held about 104,000 residents. It reaches from the St. Lawrence terraces at Deschambault-Grondines through the Portneuf farm belt to the lakes and ski hills of the Laurentian foothills.

Candidates

André Arthur (Independent) — Born in Quebec City in December 1943, Arthur went on the air at CHRC in 1970 and spent close to four decades on the region's radio dial, moving among stations including CJMF, CIMI, CHOI and CKNU and drawing a long series of defamation actions, among them suits brought by premiers Daniel Johnson Jr. and Lucien Bouchard. He described himself as a libertarian, opposed Quebec sovereignty, and took the seat in 2006 on a campaign that cost him almost nothing. In the Commons he sat with no party but voted with the government on confidence questions, and the government returned the favour by leaving the field clear. He kept driving motor coaches and doing occasional work for small Portneuf stations while serving as the member.

Richard Côté (Bloc Québécois) — Côté, from Neuville, carried the Bloc nomination. The party had contested the district at every election since it took its present shape under the 2003 boundaries.

Stéphane Asselin (Liberal), André Turgeon (NDP) and Nathan John Weatherdon (Green Party) also ran, along with a second independent, Jean Paradis of Saint-Casimir.

About the Riding

The Valcartier garrison, at Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier, is the single largest presence in the riding and the reason the Afghanistan mission was not an abstraction here. From August 2007 to February 2008 the Canadian battle group in Kandahar was built around the 3rd Battalion of the Royal 22e Régiment, with combat and service support drawn from units of 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group at Valcartier. Families in Shannon, Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier and Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier followed that rotation closely.

Shannon carried a second federal file. Trichloroethylene, long used as a degreaser at the base and at the munitions works beside it, had leached into the water table; it turned up in the base supply in 1997 and in Shannon's private wells three years after that, and residents had brought a class action naming the federal government over illnesses they attributed to the contamination. Remediation and compensation were live questions during the campaign.

Beyond the military the economy is mixed. The Deschambault aluminium smelter, running on cheap hydro power since 1992 and owned by Alcoa, anchors the western end, and a General Dynamics plant making cartridge cases — part of the former SNC TEC operation — sits at Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures. Portneuf has lumber, quarrying and dairy; Saint-Raymond, Pont-Rouge, Donnacona and Neuville are its service towns. To the north, Lac-Beauport, Stoneham-et-Tewkesbury and the Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier form Quebec City's year-round recreation belt, and Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures had grown quickly as a western suburb. Forestry aid, highway work on Routes 138 and 175, base infrastructure and rural broadband were the local federal asks in 2008.