Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Thunder Bay—Superior North

This riding went into the 2008 election with no sitting member on the ballot. Joe Comuzzi, who had represented the area since 1988, was expelled from the Liberal caucus in March 2007 after declaring he would vote for the Conservative budget, sat briefly as an independent, joined the Conservative caucus that June, and then chose not to run again. The seat joins Thunder Bay's north side to more than 90,000 square kilometres of boreal country: the Lake Superior shore through Nipigon, Schreiber, Terrace Bay and Marathon, the Highway 11 corridor through the Municipality of Greenstone, the rail settlement of Armstrong, and First Nations including Ginoogaming, Long Lake 58, Pic River and Gull Bay.

Candidates

Bruce Hyer (NDP) — Hyer had contested the riding in 2004 and 2006. He moved to northern Ontario in 1976 and started WildWaters Nature Tours and Expeditions, running canoe trips and wilderness travel from bases near Armstrong and what later became Wabakimi Provincial Park, living his first two years mostly off the land far from any road. In 1978 he opened a retail outdoor and camera shop in Thunder Bay. He worked as a contract moose biologist for the provincial natural resources ministry and completed a master's degree in forestry at Lakehead University in 1997, with research on how human disturbance affects woodland caribou.

Don McArthur (Liberal) — McArthur was a manager living at Terrace Bay on the Lake Superior north shore, campaigning to hold the seat for the Liberals after Comuzzi's departure.

Bev Sarafin (Conservative) — Sarafin worked as a political organizer and lived at Geraldton, in the Municipality of Greenstone, giving the Conservative campaign a base well inland from Thunder Bay. She had been the party's candidate here in 2004 and 2006.

Brendan Daniel Hughes (Green Party) — Hughes worked in administration and education in Thunder Bay.

Denis Andrew Carrière of Schreiber ran for the Radical Marijuana party.

About the Riding

The urban half of the seat is Thunder Bay's north side, the former City of Port Arthur, home to Lakehead University, Confederation College and the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, along with much of the city's retail employment. Past the city limits the population thins quickly over a Shield landscape of lake and rock, with small towns strung along the Trans-Canada Highway and the CN and CP main lines.

Those towns were in trouble. The pulp mill at Terrace Bay had changed hands twice in four years, spun off from Kimberly-Clark to Neenah Paper in 2004 and sold to the Thunder Bay-based Buchanan Group in 2006, and its parent's finances were deteriorating as pulp markets weakened through 2008. Marathon's kraft pulp mill, jointly owned by Tembec and Kruger, was still running but exposed to the same falling prices. Sawmills across the region were shutting down. Mining offered the counterweight: the Hemlo gold camp east of Marathon continued to produce, and exploration interest was building in the Greenstone belt around Geraldton and Beardmore, where gold had been the original reason for settlement.

Distance shapes politics here. The Trans-Canada is the only road link between eastern and western Canada, and everything moving between them squeezes across the aging two-lane bridge at Nipigon. Air and highway access, physician recruitment for small hospitals, broadband service and the survival of communities built around a single mill were the practical questions candidates were asked. Federal support for the forest sector, employment insurance eligibility for seasonal and shutdown-affected workers, and consultation with First Nations over resource development ran through the campaign.