Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour

On 19 August 2008, less than three weeks before the writ was issued, Hydro-Québec president Thierry Vandal stood in Bécancour and announced that the utility would refurbish the Gentilly-2 nuclear generating station rather than retire it. The decision meant hundreds of jobs at the western end of this riding and put nuclear regulation, a federal responsibility, into local conversation just as the campaign began. The district lies along the south shore of the St. Lawrence opposite Trois-Rivières, straddling the Centre-du-Québec and Montérégie regions and taking in the regional county municipalities of Le Bas-Richelieu, Nicolet-Yamaska and Bécancour, including the Abenaki communities of Odanak and Wôlinak.

Candidates

Louis Plamondon (Bloc Québécois) — Plamondon was born at Saint-Raymond on 31 July 1943, taught mathematics and ran a restaurant, and entered the Commons in 1984 for the riding then called Richelieu. He was one of the Quebec nationalists who broke with the Progressive Conservatives when the Meech Lake Accord failed in 1990, and he helped set up the Bloc Québécois in its aftermath. He had chaired the Bloc's parliamentary caucus since August 2004 and, having sat without a break since 1984, was the longest-serving member of that caucus going into the campaign. He was seeking an eighth consecutive term.

Réjean Bériault (Conservative), Ghislaine Cournoyer (Liberal) and Nourredine Seddiki (NDP) all ran from Sorel-Tracy; Rebecca Laplante stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Sorel-Tracy, created by the voluntary merger of Sorel and Tracy in 2000, is the largest community at roughly 34,000 residents. It stands where the Richelieu empties into the St. Lawrence at the head of Lac Saint-Pierre, a shallow widening of the river that UNESCO listed as a biosphere reserve in 2000, fringed by the Sorel islands and holding the largest freshwater floodplain in Quebec.

Heavy industry defines both ends of the riding. At Sorel-Tracy and adjoining Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel, the QIT-Fer et Titane complex — a Rio Tinto operation established there in 1950 — smelts ilmenite shipped down from the Lac Tio mine north of Havre-Saint-Pierre into titanium dioxide feedstock, iron and steel products. The shipyards that once dominated the town and employed thousands at their wartime peak had wound down by the early 1990s. At the western end, the Bécancour industrial and port park draws on cheap hydroelectricity: the Aluminerie de Bécancour, in production since 1986 with well over a thousand workers, and Silicium Québec's metallurgical silicon plant sit alongside chemical operations and the Gentilly-2 station.

Between the two, Nicolet-Yamaska is dairy and cash-crop country threaded by the Nicolet and Yamaska rivers. The town of Nicolet, about 8,000 people, is where police officers from across Quebec are trained, at the École nationale de police du Québec. Almost every resident of the riding speaks French as a first language.

Federal issues in 2008 reflected that mix. Nuclear safety regulation had become genuinely political after the Chalk River isotope shutdown and the removal of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen in January 2008, and Gentilly-2's refurbishment would run through the same regulator. Supply management in dairy, the exposure of metal fabricators and paper mills to the American downturn, and infrastructure money for small municipalities filled out the local agenda.