Shefford, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Shefford

Shefford stretched across the seam between the Montérégie and the Eastern Townships, a mixed riding of small manufacturing cities and dairy country. It took in the central and eastern parts of the Rouville regional county municipality, all of La Haute-Yamaska except Bromont, and the southwestern corner of Le Val-Saint-François, with Granby as the anchor and Waterloo, Valcourt, Saint-Césaire, Roxton Pond and Rougemont as its other centres. Created by the British North America Act and first contested in 1867, it was one of only four seats that had sent a member to every Parliament since Confederation.

Candidates

Robert Vincent (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Granby in April 1956, Vincent spent his working life on the shop floor, first as a plant foreman and later advising a union. He took the seat for the Bloc Québécois in 2004, unseating Liberal incumbent Diane St-Jacques, and held it in 2006. He went into the 2008 campaign seeking a third term.

Bernard Demers (Liberal) — Demers ran as the Liberal candidate.

Jean Lambert (Conservative) — A public relations professional, Lambert was making his second attempt at the seat, having contested Shefford for the Conservatives in 2006 with a late start and a small team. He lived in Bromont, just outside the riding.

Simon Gnocchini Messier (NDP) — Gnocchini Messier, also a Bromont resident, ran for the New Democrats.

Michel M. Champagne (Green Party) — Champagne, likewise of Bromont, stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Granby had 47,637 residents at the 2006 census, and grew again on 1 January 2007 when it merged with the surrounding Granby Township after a referendum held the previous May. The city was the commercial and industrial hub of La Haute-Yamaska, with textiles and clothing, wood products, metal fabrication, dairy processing and food manufacturing all represented. The Granby Zoo, founded under mayor Horace Boivin, drew visitors from across the province and supported a summer tourism economy that also took in the July Fête des Mascottes and the Festival de la chanson.

Valcourt, a town of barely two thousand people to the southeast, carried economic weight out of all proportion to its size. Joseph-Armand Bombardier was born there and built the first snowmobiles there, and Bombardier Recreational Products still ran its plant and design operations in the town; the Musée J. Armand Bombardier interpreted that history for visitors. Employment at the Valcourt works reached well beyond the municipal boundary into the surrounding villages.

Between the towns the riding was farmland — dairy herds on the Yamaska plain, apple orchards on the slopes at Rougemont, sugar bushes in the hills toward Waterloo. Roughly 95 percent of residents reported French as their mother tongue, and average incomes sat below the provincial figure.

The autumn of 2008 found the riding's two economic pillars both exposed. Quebec's textile and clothing plants had been shedding jobs for years under the pressure of a high dollar and low-cost imports, and Granby had felt every round of it. Recreational vehicles were a discretionary purchase, and the collapse of American consumer credit that September raised immediate questions about orders for snowmobiles and personal watercraft. Manufacturing support, employment insurance rules for seasonal and laid-off workers, and the future of supply management for dairy producers were the federal files that mattered locally.