Portage—Lisgar, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Portage—Lisgar

Two of the most reliably Conservative pieces of Manitoba met in this south-central riding: the Portage la Prairie plains along the Assiniboine and the Mennonite towns of the Pembina valley. Winkler, Morden, Altona, Carman, Manitou, Gretna, Plum Coulee, Treherne, Somerset, St. Claude and Notre Dame de Lourdes fell inside it, along with the Long Plain, Dakota Tipi and Swan Lake First Nations. The seat came open in 2008 when Brian Pallister, who had held it since 2000, decided not to seek re-election, leaving the Conservative nomination as the effective contest.

Candidates

Candice Hoeppner (Conservative) — Hoeppner was born at Morden in September 1964, the youngest of eight children, and returned to southern Manitoba to raise her family after spells in Winnipeg and British Columbia. She was living in Winkler and working as a political consultant, having managed Stephen Harper's Manitoba campaign in the 2004 Conservative leadership race. She made a proposed carbon tax her central argument, saying it would punish the farmers, truck drivers, manufacturers and long-distance commuters whose livelihoods depended on burning fuel.

Ted Klassen (Liberal) — A retired teacher and town councillor in Altona, Klassen argued that his riding sent more to Ottawa than it received. He wanted federal infrastructure money directed to the fastest-growing municipalities in southern Manitoba, singling out the Rural Municipality of Stanley, and said his council experience equipped him to work the file.

Charlie Howatt (Green Party) — Howatt farmed near Manitou and campaigned on wind generation, arguing that alternative energy had the potential to create jobs in the region and that society's wastefulness with energy was starting to catch up with it.

Mohamed Alli (NDP) — Alli worked at a distribution centre in Winnipeg. New to the riding's issues, he focused on the cost of fuel for farmers and proposed a subsidy on the fuel used in field operations. He remarked on the range of religious communities — Catholic, Mennonite, Hutterite and other Protestant — that made up the constituency.

Len Lodder, a teacher from Carman running his first campaign, stood for the Christian Heritage Party and tied farm incomes to the wider problems of fuel prices and taxation.

About the Riding

Black soil and long growing seasons made this some of the most productive farmland in Manitoba. Wheat, canola, soybeans, corn and potatoes came off the fields, and hog and cattle operations were dense across the southern municipalities. Two large potato-processing plants at Portage la Prairie — McCain Foods, which opened there in 1979, and J.R. Simplot, which began production in 2003 — anchored the local potato industry. West of the city, the former Canadian Forces base at Southport, closed by National Defence in September 1992, had been taken over by a non-profit corporation and rebuilt as an aerospace and flight-training campus.

The Pembina valley towns were growing fast, driven by high birth rates and by immigration from Germany, Mexico and Paraguay into established Mennonite communities. Winkler, Morden and Altona all recorded strong gains at the 2006 census, and the Rural Municipality of Stanley was among the fastest-expanding local governments in the province. Plautdietsch and standard German were widely spoken, and the riding had the highest concentration of German mother-tongue speakers in Canada. Church, school and cooperative institutions carried a great deal of the region's social weight.

Three federal arguments ran through the campaign. The Liberal carbon-tax proposal was raised by nearly every Conservative candidate in rural Manitoba and by Hoeppner more than most. The long-gun registry remained deeply unpopular among farmers and hunters. And the Canadian Wheat Board's marketing monopoly, contested through the courts since the government's 2007 attempt to remove barley from its control, divided producers here as elsewhere on the prairies. Portage—Lisgar had gone to Reform, the Canadian Alliance and then the Conservatives at every election since its creation for the 1997 vote.