Kootenay—Columbia, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Kootenay—Columbia

Three mountain systems shape the southeastern corner of British Columbia — the Rockies along the Alberta line, the Purcells and Selkirks through the middle, and the Monashees at the western edge — and this riding covered the valleys between them. The Columbia River rises inside it at Canal Flats, runs north past Invermere and Golden, swings around the Big Bend and comes back south through Revelstoke toward the Arrow Lakes. The Kootenay drains the eastern trench toward Creston and the international boundary. Cranbrook, with about 18,500 residents, was the largest centre, and Kimberley, Fernie, Sparwood, Elkford, Invermere, Golden, Revelstoke, Nakusp and Creston were strung along the highways an hour or more from one another. Four national parks — Kootenay, Yoho, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke — sit inside the boundaries, along with the Columbia Wetlands.

Candidates

Jim Abbott (Conservative) — Abbott had represented this corner of the province since the Reform Party breakthrough of October 1993, sitting first for Kootenay East and, after the 1997 boundary redraw, for Kootenay—Columbia. Born in Toronto in August 1942, he worked as a businessman and manager before entering politics, and he followed his party through the Canadian Alliance into the Conservative Party. He was sworn to the Privy Council on 15 October 2007, and he served as Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage from February 2006 until Parliament was dissolved. He lived at Wasa, north of Cranbrook.

Leon R. Pendleton (NDP) — Pendleton, a farmer from Edgewood on the Lower Arrow Lake, carried the New Democratic nomination.

Ralph Moore (Green) — Moore worked as a logger and lived at Creston, in the orchard country near the border.

Betty Aitchison (Liberal) — Aitchison, a homemaker from Kimberley, stood for the Liberals.

About the Riding

Two resource industries pulled in opposite directions during 2008. In the Elk Valley, the open-pit mines around Sparwood and Elkford were having their best year in living memory: the metallurgical coal used in steelmaking had settled at or above US$300 a tonne for the highest grades, and at the end of July Teck Cominco agreed to buy out Fording Canadian Coal Trust's stake in the Elk Valley Coal partnership, a transaction due to close at the end of October. Forestry went the other way. The collapse of United States housing starts pulled the bottom out of the lumber market, and the mills that anchored the smaller towns — Tembec's sawmills at Canal Flats and Elko, its pulp mill at Skookumchuck, Canfor's sawmill at Radium — spent the year selling into falling prices. The softwood lumber agreement signed in 2006, and the export charges it imposed when prices dropped, was a live complaint in every mill town.

Tourism supplied the third leg. Ski operations at Fernie, Kimberley, Invermere and Golden had drawn heavy construction and real-estate activity through the decade, and Kimberley had been remaking itself around visitors since the Sullivan Mine closed in 2001. The airport at Cranbrook, renamed the Canadian Rockies International Airport in 2007 after a runway extension and a new terminal, served the whole region.

A long-running fight over Glacier Resorts' proposal to build a year-round ski resort on the Jumbo Glacier, in the Purcells west of Invermere, ran through local politics that year. It was a provincial file rather than a federal one, but no candidate in the Columbia Valley could avoid the question.

The Ktunaxa Nation's communities are spread across the region, and the riding's population skewed older than the provincial average. Federally, the seat and its predecessors had returned Reform, Alliance and Conservative members without a break since 1993.