Western Arctic, NT — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Western Arctic

Western Arctic covered the Northwest Territories entire — more than 1.1 million square kilometres reaching from the sixtieth parallel to the Beaufort Sea. The 2006 census recorded 41,464 people living in 33 communities, from Yellowknife with roughly 19,000 residents down to hamlets of a few hundred along the Mackenzie River and the Arctic coast. Hay River, Inuvik, Fort Smith, Behchokǫ̀, Fort Simpson, Norman Wells and Tuktoyaktuk were the other main centres.

Candidates

Dennis Bevington (NDP) — Bevington went into the campaign as the sitting member and the New Democrats' critic for northern development, having taken the riding from a Liberal cabinet minister in 2006 on his third attempt. Born in Fort Smith in 1953, he was the town's mayor from 1988 to 1997, a period in which it gave official standing to Chipewyan and Cree, and he ran an alternative energy business before entering the Commons.

Brendan Bell (Conservative) — Bell was born in Milwaukee in 1971 and studied at the University of Calgary. He won Yellowknife South in the territorial election of 1999 and was returned by acclamation in 2003, after which he joined the Executive Council, holding the Industry, Tourism and Investment portfolio and later Justice, together with responsibility for homelessness. He left territorial politics in 2007 and was running a small business in Yellowknife when the Conservatives nominated him.

Gabrielle Mackenzie-Scott (Liberal) — Based in Yellowknife and self-employed, Mackenzie-Scott had served as vice-chair of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, the tribunal that assesses major development proposals along the valley. Her Franklin Avenue campaign office was broken into and ransacked during the writ period, with two laptops and a small amount of cash taken; she said it only strengthened her commitment to the race.

Sam Gamble (Green) — A transportation planner with the territorial government in Yellowknife, Gamble carried the Green Party's platform into a riding where road, air and barge links are the central fact of daily life.

The ballot also carried Noeline Villebrun of Yellowknife, National Chief of the Dene Nation from 2003 to 2006, for the First Peoples National Party, which fielded a handful of candidates nationally.

About the Riding

Roughly half the territory's residents were Indigenous — Dene, Inuvialuit and Métis — and the Northwest Territories recognised eleven official languages, more than any other jurisdiction in Canada. That composition put land claims, self-government and the terms of resource development at the centre of federal politics here.

Diamonds carried the economy. Ekati had opened in 1998 and Diavik in 2003, and De Beers brought Snap Lake into commercial production in January 2008, opening it formally that July as its first mine outside Africa and Canada's first entirely underground diamond mine. All three flew workers in on rotation from Yellowknife, Hay River and communities across the North. Hanging over everything was the Mackenzie Gas Project, the Imperial Oil-led pipeline in which the Aboriginal Pipeline Group held a one-third interest; the joint review panel closed its hearings at Inuvik in November 2007 and the territory was still waiting on the report. Two other files ran through the campaign: the Deh Cho Bridge at Fort Providence, begun in 2008 to replace the Mackenzie River ferry and winter ice crossing on Highway 3, and the abandoned Giant Mine outside Yellowknife, where some 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust awaited a federal remediation plan.

Unlike Yukon, the Northwest Territories still had no control over its own land and resource royalties, and devolution talks with Ottawa had dragged on without conclusion — a grievance every candidate was asked about. Housing shortages, diesel-fired power in small communities and the price of heating fuel filled out the local agenda. The seat had been Liberal from 1988 to 2006 under Ethel Blondin-Andrew, who sat in cabinet, before Bevington broke that hold.