Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Saint-Maurice—Champlain

Few Quebec ridings covered so much ground for so few voters. Saint-Maurice—Champlain reached from the St. Lawrence shore at Champlain and Batiscan up the Saint-Maurice River through Shawinigan and the Mékinac highlands to La Tuque and the Atikamekw communities of the boreal interior — well over 30,000 square kilometres. Four blocks made it up: the city of Shawinigan, the La Tuque agglomeration, and the Mékinac and Les Chenaux regional county municipalities.

Candidates

Jean-Yves Laforest (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Shawinigan in June 1949, Laforest worked as a school administrator before winning the seat for the Bloc Québécois in 2006, succeeding Marcel Gagnon. He served as his party's critic for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec. In 2008 he introduced a bill to create a distinct Quebec branch of the CRTC, brought forward after a Quebec television network moved to shut down its news operations.

Stéphane Roof (Conservative) — Roof, of Saint-Boniface, ran as the Conservative candidate.

Ronald St-Onge Lynch (Liberal) — St-Onge Lynch, a Grand-Mère resident, carried the Liberal banner.

Anne Marie Aubert (NDP) — Aubert, of Montreal, stood for the New Democrats.

Martial Toupin (Green Party) — Toupin, of Saint-Maurice, ran for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Shawinigan, with 51,904 residents at the 2006 census, was built on falling water. Hydroelectric development beginning in 1898 brought a chain of industrial firsts to the town, including the first aluminum produced in Canada in 1901 and the first carborundum in 1908. Hydro-Québec still ran the Shawinigan-2 and Shawinigan-3 generating stations, dating from 1911 and 1948, and the aluminum smelter built in 1941 remained in operation.

The paper industry that had grown alongside the dams was in retreat, and the timing put it at the centre of the campaign. AbitibiBowater announced in November 2007 that it would close the Belgo mill, which had been making paper in Shawinigan since 1901; the machines stopped in February 2008, eight months before the vote, and about 550 jobs went with them. That left the Laurentide mill in the Grand-Mère sector as the last major paper operation in the city. Shawinigan had been pushing diversification for a decade, including the Cité de l'Énergie interpretation and tourism complex opened in 1997, but unemployment and the outmigration of younger workers remained the dominant political facts.

North of the city the riding turned to forest. The Mékinac RCM was more than 90 percent wooded, and forestry was its leading economic activity; its municipalities included Saint-Tite, the only city in the county and host of a large annual western festival, along with Sainte-Thècle and Lac-aux-Sables. La Tuque, the largest city in Canada by area, depended on its Smurfit-Stone pulp and paper mill and on hydroelectric operations upriver. Three Atikamekw reserves — Wemotaci, Obedjiwan and Coucoucache — lay enclosed within its territory, and La Mauricie National Park sat between the city and the highlands.

The southern strip along the St. Lawrence in Les Chenaux was older and gentler country: Champlain, Batiscan and Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, farming villages with seventeenth-century roots and a winter tommycod fishery.

With the forestry sector squeezed by a high Canadian dollar, weak American housing demand and the softwood lumber regime, the federal questions that carried weight here were sector aid, employment insurance for older laid-off workers, and whether Ottawa's regional development agency could do anything for one-industry towns losing their industry.