Provencher, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Provencher

Provencher was created in 1871, one of the first four ridings allotted to Manitoba after the province entered Confederation, and its 2008 boundaries ran from the Red River valley south of Winnipeg east to the Ontario border and south to the forty-ninth parallel. Steinbach was its largest city; Morris, Emerson, Lorette, Ste. Anne, La Broquerie, Niverville, Grunthal, Vita, Lac du Bonnet and Pinawa filled out the settled areas, and the granite and jack pine of the Whiteshell occupied the northeast. The sitting member was one of the more senior figures in the federal cabinet.

Candidates

Vic Toews (Conservative) — Toews was born in September 1952 at Filadelfia, Paraguay, where his Mennonite parents were teaching, and came to Manitoba with his family in 1956. He practised law and worked as a Crown attorney before entering provincial politics, winning Rossmere for the Progressive Conservatives in 1995 and serving as Manitoba's labour minister and then as attorney general. He took Provencher federally in 2000 for the Canadian Alliance. After the 2006 election he was appointed federal justice minister and attorney general, and on 4 January 2007 he moved to the Treasury Board presidency, the post he held through the 2008 campaign as he sought a fourth term.

Ross Martin (NDP) — A design coordinator living at Oakbank, Martin made crime his central issue, arguing that tough talk from the government had not stopped the running gun battles in Winnipeg and that the consequences reached into the riding's commuter belt. He wanted spending directed to community and drop-in centres rather than to more jails.

Shirley Hiebert (Liberal) — Hiebert worked in health care consulting and lived in Steinbach. She put health care first, citing the number of seniors in the riding and the cost of prescription drugs, and pointed to her party's proposed drug plan.

Janine Gibson (Green Party) — An organic inspector based near Steinbach, Gibson campaigned almost entirely on the hog industry, saying the riding carried the highest number of hog barns per hectare in western Canada and that manure was being spread at two, three and sometimes four times the allowable rate, building up salts in the soil and running off into the water system feeding Lake Winnipeg.

David Reimer, a Steinbach clergyman, stood for the Christian Heritage Party on a platform built around the sanctity of life and the traditional definition of marriage.

About the Riding

Hog production was the local controversy of 2008. Manitoba's Bill 17 imposed a permanent ban on building or expanding hog barns across the Red River valley, the southeast and the Interlake, covering roughly six and a half million acres, and it received royal assent on 9 October — five days before the federal vote. It was provincial legislation, but it dominated agricultural argument in the riding through the federal campaign, with producers and environmental advocates taking opposite views of what Ottawa should do about manure management and water quality.

Steinbach was the story of the decade in southeastern Manitoba. Settled in the 1870s by Mennonites from the Russian Empire, it recorded 11,066 residents at the 2006 census after growing by nearly a fifth in five years, much of that from German, Filipino and Mexican immigration. Its manufacturers, car dealerships, trucking firms and health services drew workers from a wide radius, and its expansion pulled construction activity across the surrounding municipalities.

The riding's French-speaking communities gave it a second character. Ste. Anne, La Broquerie, Lorette, Richer and Île-des-Chênes traced their origins to nineteenth-century francophone settlement, and French remained a first language for a sizeable minority.

Further north, Pinawa was still adjusting to the 1998 decision to close the Whiteshell Laboratories. The nuclear regulator issued a six-year decommissioning licence in 2003, the first of its kind in Canada, and the town never recovered the research payroll of its peak. Elsewhere the constituency ran on farming, trucking, construction and the Whiteshell tourist trade. Toews had held the seat since 2000, and it had returned Canadian Alliance and Conservative members at every election since.