Sarnia—Lambton, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Sarnia—Lambton

Where Lake Huron narrows and begins to run south as the St. Clair River, the Canadian bank carries one of the densest concentrations of heavy industry in the country, and this riding was built around it. Its territory was the City of Sarnia, the Village of Point Edward at the Canadian foot of the Blue Water Bridge, the towns of Petrolia and Plympton-Wyoming, the Village of Oil Springs, the townships of Enniskillen and St. Clair, and the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's reserve pressed against Sarnia's industrial south end.

Candidates

Pat Davidson (Conservative) — Davidson went into the campaign as the sitting member, having unseated Roger Gallaway in January 2006 and ended thirteen years of Liberal representation. Everything in her record before Ottawa was municipal: mayor of the Village of Wyoming from 1991, mayor of the amalgamated Town of Plympton-Wyoming from 2001 until her election to Parliament, and repeated terms as warden of Lambton County. She still lived in Wyoming.

Andy Bruziewicz (NDP) — Bruziewicz had sat on Sarnia city council since 1994 and kept his council seat while running federally, which made him about as familiar a name as the city ballot could offer.

Tim Fugard (Liberal) — A controller by profession, Fugard lived in Petrolia, in the farming and oil-heritage half of the riding south of the city. The Liberal organisation he inherited had held the seat continuously from 1993 until two years earlier.

Allan McKeown (Green) — Retired and living in Sarnia, McKeown had carried the Green banner in this riding once before, at the 2000 general election.

Christopher Desormeaux-Malm, a factory line operator from Chatham, ran for the Christian Heritage Party.

About the Riding

About 105,000 people lived here at the 2006 census, and the corridor of refineries and chemical plants running south from the city set the wage floor for most of them. More than sixty industrial facilities sat within a short radius of Sarnia, and what happened inside their fences drove everything else.

Two of those plants framed the campaign. Dow Chemical, in Sarnia since 1942, had announced in 2006 that it would wind up production there by the end of 2008, taking roughly 380 jobs with it. Against that, Suncor had completed a $960-million upgrade of its Sarnia refinery in 2007 — the largest desulphurisation project the corridor had seen in three decades — and its St. Clair ethanol plant at Mooretown, opened in 2006, was producing 200 million litres a year. Petrochemical demand tracks housing, construction and vehicles, all of which were contracting as the campaign ran through September and early October, and the Liberal carbon-tax proposal was heard differently in a town whose payroll depends on refining.

The Aamjiwnaang reserve adjoins the plants. A 2005 study of the community's birth records, published in a peer-reviewed environmental health journal, found the proportion of boys born there had fallen sharply over the preceding decade. It drew national attention and left emissions monitoring in the corridor a standing question for both Ottawa and Queen's Park.

Away from the river, Lambton County is farm country, growing soybeans, grain corn and winter wheat out of towns whose populations run to a few thousand. The Blue Water Bridge is federal property on the Canadian side, operated through a federal Crown corporation, and ranks among the busiest commercial crossings on the Canada–United States border — a rare local bottleneck for which Ottawa is directly answerable. Bluewater Health, which ran the hospitals in Sarnia and Petrolia, was the area's largest public-sector employer, and Lambton College its main post-secondary institution.