Vancouver Island North, BC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Vancouver Island North

Few Canadian ridings covered so much ground for so few people. Vancouver Island North was made up of the Comox-Strathcona and Mount Waddington regional districts together with the southern part of the Central Coast district on the mainland opposite — more than 52,000 square kilometres holding roughly 113,000 residents. It reached from the Comox Valley to Cape Scott, taking in Courtenay, Comox, Cumberland, Campbell River, Sayward, Gold River, Tahsis, Woss, Port Alice, Port McNeill, Port Hardy and Alert Bay, along with Quadra, Cortes, Denman and Hornby islands.

Candidates

John Duncan (Conservative) — Duncan sat for this stretch of the island from 1993 until 2006, first as member for North Island—Powell River and then, after the boundaries were redrawn, for Vancouver Island North. He entered the Commons with the Reform Party and moved through the Canadian Alliance to the Conservatives before Bell unseated him. He took a forestry degree at the University of British Columbia in 1972, spent about twenty years as an operational forester in coastal logging operations, and served as an alderman in Ucluelet in 1982-83, and had since been consulting out of Campbell River.

Catherine Bell (NDP) — Bell was the sitting member, having taken the constituency in 2006 after a narrow loss to Duncan two years earlier. Born in Comox and living in Cumberland, she had been a vice-president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union, and served as the New Democrats' natural resources critic — a portfolio that put her in the middle of the forestry, mining and energy questions running through her own riding. She campaigned heavily on mill closures and on the condition of wild salmon stocks.

Philip Stone (Green) — A publisher based at Quathiaski Cove on Quadra Island, Stone ran for the Greens on coastal protection and small-community economics.

Geoff Fleischer (Liberal) — A student from Comox, Fleischer carried the Liberal campaign, built around the party's carbon-pricing platform.

Jason Draper, an entrepreneur from Courtenay, also stood as an Independent.

About the Riding

The riding's fortunes had always tracked the price of wood, fish and metal, and 2008 was a hard year for all three. In July, Catalyst Paper announced that the sawdust-based pulp and containerboard operations at its Elk Falls mill in Campbell River would shut permanently on 30 November, ending about 440 jobs. Sawmill closures across British Columbia had cut off the sawdust the mill depended on, and the company also blamed energy and chemical costs, labour costs and the municipal industrial tax rate. After years of contraction under the softwood lumber dispute, the announcement hung over the campaign in the riding's largest town.

Aquaculture split the constituency. Open-net salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago and around the Discovery Islands were a rare source of steady work in places with few alternatives, while First Nations, sport-fishing operators and biologists argued that sea lice from the pens were damaging wild juvenile salmon on their way to sea. Because Fisheries and Oceans Canada regulated both the wild stocks and the waters the pens sat in, the dispute was squarely federal, and candidates were pressed on whether farms should be moved into closed containment.

Other employment came from the Quinsam coal mine west of Campbell River, which was expanding output that year, from tourism and sport fishing along the inside passage, and from 19 Wing Comox, the largest single federal employer on the north island and the base for search-and-rescue coverage of the whole coast. The Comox Valley's growing population of retirees gave the southern end of the riding a different character from the resource towns north of Sayward.

First Nations communities were spread throughout: the 'Namgis at Alert Bay, Kwakwaka'wakw villages along the northern coast, and the We Wai Kai and We Wai Kum at Campbell River and Quadra Island. Treaty negotiations, fisheries allocation and the federal response to residential schools were direct local concerns, and distance made everything harder — long drives to hospital, thin ferry service to the outer islands, patchy communications north of Woss.