Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Lambton—Kent—Middlesex

Few Ontario seats covered more ground than Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, some 5,277 square kilometres of farmland running from the Lake Huron shore down toward the Thames. It took in all of Middlesex County except the City of London and Thames Centre Township, the part of Chatham-Kent lying north of the Thames apart from the former City of Chatham, and four Lambton County municipalities: Lambton Shores, Warwick, Brooke-Alvinston and Dawn-Euphemia. The Kettle Point and Walpole Island reserves sat inside its boundaries. About 105,000 people lived there.

Candidates

Bev Shipley (Conservative) — Born in 1947 and a lifelong resident of Middlesex County, Shipley trained at Centralia College of Agricultural Technology and took over the family farm at Denfield. He won a seat on Lobo Township council in 1986 and served as warden of Middlesex County in 1995; after Lobo was folded into the new Municipality of Middlesex Centre in 1998 he spent six years as its mayor. He came up short against Liberal Rose-Marie Ur in 2004 and won the seat two years later when she did not seek re-election. In the 39th Parliament he sat on the industry, science and technology and veterans affairs committees, and from late 2007 on the transport, infrastructure and communities committee.

Jeff Wesley (Liberal) — A Wallaceburg resident, Wesley was mayor of the town from 1991 until the 1998 amalgamation, after which he sat on Chatham-Kent council for its Wallaceburg ward. His working career was at Union Gas, where he was a manager in government relations.

Joe Hill (NDP) — A small business owner from Sarnia, Hill was making his first run at the seat.

Jim Johnston (Green Party) — A business owner living at Ilderton in Middlesex Centre, Johnston had carried the Green banner here in 2006 and was back for a second attempt.

Micheal Janssens, a financial security advisor from Strathroy, stood for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

Farming set the terms here. Grain corn, soybeans and winter wheat covered the fields, with dairy, beef, hog and poultry operations filling out the rest. Strathroy and Wallaceburg were the two largest centres, and Dresden, Glencoe, Lucan, Ailsa Craig, Parkhill, Watford, Alvinston, Forest and the resort village of Grand Bend served the surrounding concessions.

Wallaceburg carried the memory of an industrial past. A glassworks opened there in 1894 as Sydenham Glass, passed through Dominion Glass and finished its life as Libbey Canada; at its peak it employed more than 1,400 people. Libbey shut it in May 1999, moving production to Ohio and Mexico and putting roughly 560 people out of work. The town had been known as Canada's Glasstown, and the closure shaped local politics for a decade afterward. The manufacturing contraction spreading across southwestern Ontario through 2008 kept the subject live.

Land questions were unusually current. The Ipperwash Inquiry reported on 30 May 2007 and recommended returning Camp Ipperwash — appropriated from the Stony Point band by the federal government in 1942 — to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point. In December 2007 Ontario agreed to turn over the adjacent provincial park, but the former army camp remained in federal hands going into the campaign, which left Ottawa's role squarely on the table.

Farm income supports, the cost of diesel and fertilizer, and the Liberal carbon-tax proposal all figured in a riding where those are line items rather than abstractions. The seat and its predecessors had leaned Conservative for most of their history, with Ur's four terms the notable interruption.