Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Chatham-Kent—Essex

The Thames River drew the northern edge of this riding. Everything in the Municipality of Chatham-Kent south of the river belonged to it, along with the former City of Chatham, which straddles the banks, the Town of Leamington in Essex County and the Moravian 47 reserve. Its 1,924 square kilometres of flat, heavy clay plain — drained and diked over a century and a half — take in Blenheim, Ridgetown, Tilbury and Merlin, the fishing villages of Wheatley and Erieau on Lake Erie, Rondeau Provincial Park, and Point Pelee National Park at the southern tip of the Canadian mainland.

Candidates

Dave Van Kesteren (Conservative) — Van Kesteren was born in Chatham in 1955, two years after his parents reached Canada from the Netherlands, his father from Noordwijk and his mother from Schoonhoven. In 1987 he set up a Hyundai dealership in Chatham under his own name. He helped found the Chatham Sunrise Rotary Club and had led the Chatham Christian Business Association as its president. His first run at the seat in 2004 fell just short against Liberal incumbent Jerry Pickard; he took it in 2006 and sat on the Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the Parliament that followed.

Matt Daudlin (Liberal) — A teacher living in Chatham.

Ron Cadotte (NDP) — Retired, of Chatham.

Alina Abbott (Green Party) — A teacher living in Chatham.

About the Riding

Two economies overlap here, and both were unsettled in 2008.

The first is agricultural and unusually intensive. Corn, soybeans, winter wheat, sugar beets and processing tomatoes come off the Essex and Kent clay plains, which owe their long growing season to the surrounding lakes and their workability to a century of municipal drains and dikes. Leamington's greenhouse district — tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers under glass — had been expanding for years and formed the largest concentration of greenhouse vegetable production in North America, dependent on natural gas for heat and on year-round shipping into American markets. Energy prices and border logistics were therefore direct pocketbook issues. The H.J. Heinz plant in Leamington, processing tomatoes there since 1908, anchored the food side and set contract terms that mattered to hundreds of area growers.

The second economy is industrial. Chatham had Navistar's truck plant on Richmond Street, built in 1948 and turning out International heavy trucks, plus automotive parts operations and, since 1997, one of the largest ethanol distilleries in the country, taking in corn from the surrounding townships. Wheatley's harbour supported one of the biggest freshwater commercial fishing fleets anywhere. The Municipality of Chatham-Kent counted 108,177 residents at the 2006 census, almost exactly what it had held five years earlier, and its median age had climbed from 35.9 years in 1996 to 41.2 — the pattern across rural south-western Ontario as younger residents left for Windsor, London and Toronto.

Federal issues followed from all that. Farm groups pressed for changes to agricultural risk-management and income-stabilisation programs, which had been reworked repeatedly and satisfied few. The manufacturing downturn put employment insurance eligibility and plant closures on the agenda in Chatham. The Canada–United States border mattered more here than in most ridings, since nearly all of the produce and the truck output crossed at Windsor–Detroit and delays there translated into spoiled loads and idle shifts. The health of the Lake Erie fishery, water quality in the Thames watershed, and the state of the drainage infrastructure the farm economy rests on were raised regularly.

The Liberal carbon-pricing proposal met organised resistance in a riding where greenhouse heating, farm diesel and long-haul trucking are core costs of doing business, and where a manufacturing and farm sector already squeezed by the high dollar had little room to absorb new charges.