Brandon—Souris, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Brandon—Souris

Brandon—Souris fills the southwestern corner of Manitoba, with Saskatchewan on the west and the United States on the south, reaching north to about Rivers and Oak River and east to the Glenboro and Wawanesa country. The city of Brandon supplies about half the riding's people; the rest live in Virden, Killarney, Souris, Carberry, Boissevain, Melita, Deloraine, Elkhorn, Reston and the farm sections between them. Canadian Forces Base Shilo lies east of Brandon inside the riding.

Candidates

Merv Tweed (Conservative) — Elected here in 2004 as successor to Rick Borotsik, Tweed was seeking a third term. He was born at Medora, studied at Brandon University and ran a used car dealership for seventeen years before entering public life as a councillor and then deputy reeve in the Rural Municipality of Brenda. He sat in the Manitoba legislature nine years for Turtle Mountain, from 1995, and was made Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism by Gary Filmon in February 1999. In April 2006 he was elected chairman of the Commons transport, infrastructure and communities committee, a useful perch for a riding that lives on moving grain and cattle.

John Bouché (NDP) — Bouché was a locomotive engineer living in Brandon and carried the New Democratic nomination in a riding where the party's strength was concentrated in the city rather than the countryside.

Dave Barnes (Green) — Barnes, a Brandon teacher, ran for the Green Party.

Martha Jo Willard (Liberal) — Willard, a physician from Winnipeg, was the Liberal candidate.

Jerome Dondo, an accountant from Treherne, stood for the Christian Heritage Party, and Lisa Gallagher, of Brandon, for the Communist Party.

About the Riding

The riding counted 84,602 residents at the 2006 census, a rise of 1.3 per cent over five years, and the growth was almost entirely urban. Brandon held roughly 41,500 people and had been pulled in a new direction by a single plant. Maple Leaf Foods began phasing in a full second kill-and-cut shift at its pork works on Richmond Avenue East in June 2008, a change meant to lift weekly throughput from about 50,000 hogs toward 86,000 and requiring a workforce the surrounding district could not supply. The company had recruited abroad since 2002, steering many hires into the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program, and Brandon's Filipino and Latin American communities grew quickly. Settlement capacity, housing supply and the temporary foreign worker stream became municipal preoccupations in a city that had not handled immigration at that scale before.

The hog sector that fed the plant was in serious trouble. High feed grain prices, a dollar that had touched par, and mandatory American country-of-origin labelling — in force from 30 September 2008, in the middle of the campaign — squeezed producers who had built their operations around exporting weanlings and feeders into the United States. Federal support for the sector came up at every farm meeting.

The grain question ran alongside it. The Conservative government had spent the 39th Parliament trying to end the Canadian Wheat Board's single-desk authority over barley, and the fight had reached the courts. Producers here divided on the merits, and the issue distinguished the parties more cleanly than anything else on offer.

Canadian Forces Base Shilo, some 35 kilometres east of Brandon, was home to the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, which rotated through Afghanistan in this period. Among the largest employers in the riding, it gave the mission a personal dimension in Brandon that it lacked elsewhere.

Beyond the city, grain, oilseeds and cattle dominated, though Virden sat atop the Manitoba end of the Williston Basin and had an active oilfield service economy. Brandon University and Assiniboine Community College anchored post-secondary education, and Turtle Mountain Provincial Park on the international boundary was the best-known natural feature.