Nanaimo—Alberni, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Nanaimo—Alberni

Highway 4 holds this riding together. It leaves the Island Highway at Parksville, climbs past Cameron Lake and the old-growth Douglas firs of Cathedral Grove, and drops into the Alberni Valley at the head of a saltwater inlet that runs forty kilometres out to the open Pacific. On the east coast the constituency takes in the northern half of Nanaimo, Lantzville, Parksville and Qualicum Beach, plus the rural country at Nanoose Bay, Errington, Coombs and Bowser, and Lasqueti Island offshore. On the far side of the mountains it takes in Port Alberni and the farms of the Beaver Creek district.

Candidates

James Lunney (Conservative) — Born in Winnipeg on 5 September 1951, Lunney took a science degree at the University of Manitoba in 1972 and a Doctor of Chiropractic at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto in 1976. He practised for about fifteen years in Kitchener before moving west and opening West Coast Chiropractic in Parksville, where he worked for another nine. Elected as a Canadian Alliance member in 2000 and returned as a Conservative in 2004 and 2006, he was best known in the Commons for Bill C-420, a private member's bill introduced in March 2003 that would have reclassified natural health products as foods. He lived at Errington.

Zeni Maartman (NDP) — Maartman managed a BCAA office in Nanaimo and had worked in insurance since 1989, holding the chartered insurance professional designation. Her volunteer record ran through the city's business and tourism organisations, including a term as president of Tourism Nanaimo.

John Fryer (Green) — Fryer spent his career in the labour movement before turning to the Greens. He became general secretary of the B.C. Government Employees' Union in 1969 and served until 1983, and he led the National Union of Provincial Government Employees from 1980 to 1990, building it into the second-largest union in the country. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1994 and afterwards taught at the University of Victoria, where he lived.

Richard Pesik (Liberal) — Pesik taught school in Port Alberni and stood for the Liberals.

Frank Wagner of Nanaimo ran for the Christian Heritage Party, and Barbara Biley, a health care worker from Courtenay, for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

No federal riding in the country had an older median age. Parksville and Qualicum Beach had drawn retirees for decades with mild weather and long sand beaches, which pushed health care, wait times and pension income up the list of doorstep concerns.

Port Alberni told the opposite story. Catalyst Paper had idled the mill's No. 4 paper machine indefinitely in September 2007, taking 134,000 tonnes of annual newsprint capacity out of production, and agreed to bring it back only in February 2008, after the mill's unions accepted a new contract that carried some $14 million in early retirement and severance payments. That came on top of two decades of contraction in sawmilling and commercial fishing, and it made employment insurance, retraining money and federal support for the forest industry matter here as they did not on the Parksville side of the mountain.

The north Nanaimo commercial strip served a wide catchment, and visitors came for Rathtrevor Beach, MacMillan Provincial Park and Mount Arrowsmith. The Somass River sockeye run supported commercial and recreational fisheries, and its management by the federal fisheries department was a perennial argument.

The Tseshaht and Hupacasath nations hold territory around Port Alberni, and the Snaw-naw-as and Qualicum First Nations sit on the east coast. The riding had voted for Reform, Alliance and Conservative candidates without interruption since 1993, and Lunney had built a personal following well beyond his party's base.