Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Thunder Bay—Rainy River

Thunder Bay—Rainy River runs about 40,000 square kilometres west from Lake Superior along the Minnesota border to Lake of the Woods. It pairs the southern half of the city of Thunder Bay — the former City of Fort William, below the Harbour Expressway — with the whole of the Rainy River District: Fort Frances, Atikokan, Rainy River and Emo, together with Neebing, Oliver Paipoonge, Gillies and a long list of townships and unorganized territories.

Candidates

John Rafferty (NDP) — Rafferty was making his third run at this seat, having contested it in 2004 and 2006 after standing in Thunder Bay—Superior North in 2000; he had also run provincially in Thunder Bay—Atikokan in 2003 and 2007. Born in Wingham in southwestern Ontario, he worked as a broadcaster at CKPR in Thunder Bay before going into business for himself producing voice and video work for training and educational material. By 2008 he was living in Fort Frances, which put the New Democratic campaign's base at the western end of the riding.

Ken Boshcoff (Liberal) — Boshcoff had held the seat since 2004 and was defending it for the second time. A lifelong Thunder Bay resident, he studied political science and economics at Lakehead University and took a master's degree in environmental studies at York. He sat on Thunder Bay council from 1979 to 1997 and served as the city's mayor from 1997 to 2003, and during that period was president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.

Richard Neumann (Conservative) — Neumann worked as an insurance adjuster and lived in the Municipality of Neebing, southwest of Thunder Bay.

Russ Aegard (Green Party) — Aegard was an elementary school teacher from South Gillies who had carried the Green banner in the riding at the two previous general elections.

About the Riding

Roughly 80,000 people live here, most of them on Thunder Bay's south side. The port on Lake Superior is the eastern terminus of the prairie grain system, and its elevators and the shipping season make federal grain policy an employment question; the government's attempt to end the Canadian Wheat Board's single desk on barley had been fought through the courts during the previous Parliament. Bombardier's rail plant on the south side, which won a contract in December 2006 to build 234 subway cars for the Toronto Transit Commission and began the work in 2007, was the city's largest manufacturer.

Forestry set the mood. A high dollar and collapsing American housing demand had emptied the lumber market, and AbitibiBowater's permanent closure of its idled Fort William paper mill, announced in November 2007, cost about 265 mill jobs and dozens more in the woodlands. The shutdown also destroyed the market for wood chips, a substantial share of the revenue of several area sawmills. Buchanan Forest Products, once one of the region's largest private employers, had idled mills across the northwest. Fort Frances, a town of about 8,000, still depended on the AbitibiBowater pulp and paper mill that employed hundreds of residents, and its future hung over every local economic discussion.

Atikokan, built on the Steep Rock iron mines and left to reinvent itself after they closed, had turned to tourism around Quetico Provincial Park while its coal-fired generating station faced an uncertain future under Ontario's phase-out plans. Along the border, the crossing between Fort Frances and International Falls carries commercial and visitor traffic, and the coming American requirement for passports or equivalent documents at land crossings worried tourism operators. First Nations across the district raised questions about services, treaty implementation and access to remote settlements.