Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing

An electoral district larger than most European countries, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing sprawls across roughly 100,000 square kilometres of northeastern Ontario. It reaches from Manitoulin Island and the North Channel of Lake Huron north through the Algoma highlands to the Highway 11 corridor at Kapuskasing and Hearst, drawing on parts of the Algoma, Manitoulin, Sudbury and Cochrane districts. The seat and its predecessor had returned a Liberal at five straight general elections.

Candidates

Carol Hughes (NDP) — Born at Val Caron on 26 November 1958 and living at Hanmer, Hughes worked as a staff representative for the Canadian Labour Congress, a job that took her through the region's mill towns and mining communities and gave her a network in most of them. She had run here twice already, losing to the sitting member in 2004 and again in 2006, and came back for a third attempt.

Brent St. Denis (Liberal) — St. Denis was born at Blind River on 27 May 1950 and took a degree in industrial engineering at the University of Toronto in 1972. He worked as an industrial engineer, a teacher and an executive assistant before entering politics, won the old Algoma riding in 1993 and held the seat through four further elections as boundaries shifted around him. He served as parliamentary secretary to the ministers of Natural Resources and of Transport, and chaired the Commons standing committee on industry, science and technology. Living at Spanish, on the North Channel, he was seeking a sixth term.

Dianne Musgrove (Conservative) — A registered practical nurse from Birch Island, on the Highway 6 approach to Manitoulin, Musgrove carried the Conservative banner across a district that takes the better part of two days to drive end to end.

Lorraine Rekmans (Green Party) — A journalist and a member of Serpent River First Nation, Rekmans began her working life at the Elliot Lake Standard, edited Council Fires and the Anishinabek News, and served as executive director of the National Aboriginal Forestry Association. She co-edited This Is My Homeland, a collection of accounts by Serpent River members of what uranium mining at Elliot Lake did to their community, and handled Aboriginal affairs for the Greens.

About the Riding

There is no dominant city here. Population is scattered among small towns — Elliot Lake, Espanola, Blind River, Chapleau, Wawa, Manitouwadge, Kapuskasing and Hearst among them — plus numerous First Nations, including Serpent River and the large unceded Wikwemikong territory on Manitoulin. Manitoulin, the largest freshwater island in the world, contributes farming, tourism and ferry traffic from Tobermory, and gives the southern end of the riding a character entirely unlike the boreal north.

Resource extraction built every one of those towns and the 2008 campaign found the sector in trouble. Newsprint and lumber demand had fallen sharply, mills across the northeast were running reduced schedules or idling outright, and the softwood lumber dispute with the United States continued to shape what Canadian producers could ship. Kapuskasing and Hearst depend on pulp, paper and sawmilling; Espanola's economy turns on its pulp mill. Mining still matters across the Algoma and Sudbury districts, but Elliot Lake, once billed as the uranium capital of the world, saw its last mine, the Stanleigh, close on 30 June 1996 and had spent the decade since remaking itself around affordable retirement housing and outdoor tourism.

Distance drives most other issues. Highways 11 and 17 are the only practical land links for much of the riding, medical specialists are hours away for many residents, and the cost of fuel — high through the summer of 2008 — bites harder where every errand involves a drive. Treaty rights, land claims and service delivery on reserve were recurring questions, as was the shape of any federal response to the forestry downturn.