Nickel Belt, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Nickel Belt

For the first time since 1993, the Nickel Belt ballot did not carry Raymond Bonin's name. The Liberal member had said in November 2006 that he would not seek another term, leaving an open seat in a riding of roughly 26,500 square kilometres in northeastern Ontario. It takes in the ring of communities around Greater Sudbury — Chelmsford, Azilda, Val Caron, Hanmer, Capreol, Dowling, Coniston and the Onaping Falls area — then runs far beyond them, east to West Nipissing and Sturgeon Falls, south to Killarney and the north shore of Georgian Bay, and north through Cartier and Gogama.

Candidates

Claude Gravelle (NDP) — Gravelle was a retired machinist and union organiser from Inco's Sudbury operations and a member of the United Steelworkers, living in Chelmsford. He won a seat on Rayside-Balfour town council in 1997, and once amalgamation folded that town into Greater Sudbury he took a turn as co-chair of the local community action network; a bid for a seat on the new city council in 2003 came up short. This was his third run at the riding, having lost narrowly to Bonin in both 2004 and 2006.

Louise Portelance (Liberal) — Portelance won the Liberal nomination in April 2007. A business owner from Skead, she served a term as a Valley East councillor, sat on Greater Sudbury's first amalgamated council, was named deputy mayor in 2003 and ran for mayor that year. Her board work included the Sudbury and District Health Unit, EarthCare Sudbury and the airport committee, and she had been president of the Association française des municipalités de l'Ontario, the Children's Community Network and the Children's Services Co-operative.

Ian McCracken (Conservative) — McCracken was a sales agent based in Sudbury.

Fred Twilley (Green Party) — Twilley was a retired Sudbury resident.

An independent candidate, Yves Villeneuve, and Steve Rutchinski of the Marxist-Leninist Party also appeared on the ballot.

About the Riding

Mining sets the terms of life here. The Sudbury Basin holds one of the world's great concentrations of nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum group metals, and the headframes, mills and smelters ringing it have employed generations of families in the villages the riding contains. What changed in the years before this election was ownership. In 2006 Xstrata acquired Falconbridge and Vale acquired Inco, and both transactions passed through federal review under the Investment Canada Act. That put a question squarely on Ottawa's desk that voters in Nickel Belt cared about more than most Canadians: what commitments a foreign purchaser owes to the communities that depend on its mines, and who enforces them. Nickel prices, which had reached extraordinary highs in 2007, had fallen steeply by the autumn of 2008, sharpening the worry.

Forestry provides the second economic leg, particularly in the outlying reaches around Sturgeon Falls, Markstay-Warren, Cartier and Gogama, and it was in poor shape. A high Canadian dollar, American duties under the softwood lumber agreement and the collapse of United States housing construction had put northern Ontario mills under sustained pressure through 2007 and 2008.

Much of the riding is French-speaking or bilingual. Rayside-Balfour, Chelmsford and West Nipissing have deep Franco-Ontarian roots, and services in French from federal institutions are a standing local expectation. Beyond the mines and mills the economy leans on public sector and service work that follows from Greater Sudbury's position as the regional centre for the northeast, along with tourism drawn to the lakes, Killarney Provincial Park and the Georgian Bay shore. The long-gun registry, unpopular in the riding's rural stretches, ran as an undercurrent through the campaign.