Madawaska—Restigouche

Madawaska—Restigouche spans the northwestern corner of New Brunswick, following the Saint John River and the Restigouche River along the province's borders with Quebec and the state of Maine. With a population of 60,184, it is the least populous of New Brunswick's federal ridings. The district's main population centres are Edmundston (population 16,437) in the south and Campbellton (population 7,049) in the north, connected by roughly 200 kilometres of highway through dense forest. Dalhousie, Saint-Quentin, and Kedgwick are among the smaller communities scattered through the interior.

French is the mother tongue of approximately 80% of residents, making this the second-most Francophone riding in Canada outside Quebec. The Francophone population of the Madawaska region are known as "Brayons," a distinct cultural identity with roots in both Acadian and Québécois heritage. Edmundston sits directly across the border from Madawaska, Maine—a town that is itself more than 60% French-speaking—creating a bilingual cross-border community linked by the Edmundston–Madawaska Bridge, one of the busiest Canada–U.S. land crossings in the region.

Candidates

René Arseneault (Liberal) A lawyer specializing in corporate law and civil litigation for more than 20 years, Arseneault established his own practice in 1996 with his spouse, Michèle Pelletier. He holds degrees in economics, political science, and law from the Université de Moncton. Notably, he became the first lawyer in New Brunswick to join the bar without swearing an oath to the monarch, having successfully challenged the requirement. First elected in 2015, he was named Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages in 2019. He is also a singer-songwriter who won the People's Choice Award at the 1989 Gala de la chanson de Caraquet.

Shawn Beaulieu (Conservative) A young lawyer originally from Sainte-Anne-de-Madawaska, Beaulieu had been a member of the New Brunswick Bar since completing his university studies. He represented the Conservatives in the Edmundston area and campaigned on economic development and addressing rural depopulation.

Nancy Mercier (PPC) A bilingual resident of Campbellton, Mercier spent 30 years in finance with pharmaceutical companies including Bausch & Lomb, Warner Lambert, and Pfizer. She also co-owned and managed a construction business and founded a non-profit educational organization.

About the Riding

Forestry has been the dominant industry in Madawaska—Restigouche for over a century. The Twin Rivers pulp mill in Edmundston, the city's largest private employer and biggest taxpayer, employs approximately 400 people and operates a 45-megawatt biomass cogeneration plant that sells electricity to New Brunswick Power. The broader forestry cluster—including the company's lumber mill in Plaster Rock and its paper mill across the border in Madawaska, Maine—sustains hundreds of additional jobs throughout the region. In Campbellton, the Atholville pulp mill is the area's largest single employer.

Despite the surviving operations, the forestry sector has contracted significantly. Dalhousie lost its dominant employer when the Abitibi-Bowater newsprint mill closed in 2008, a blow from which the town has not fully recovered. The manufacturing workforce in Restigouche County fell from 3,388 in 1981 to roughly 1,215 by 2021. Campbellton and Dalhousie, which together had a combined population exceeding 16,000 in the 1960s, had shrunk to about 10,000 by the 2016 census. Youth outmigration, an aging population, and the loss of well-paying industrial jobs have posed persistent challenges across the riding.

Cross-border infrastructure was a significant development in 2021. Construction began in May on a replacement for the aging Edmundston–Madawaska Bridge, a project to modernize one of the region's key commercial and commuter links to the United States. The riding also faces challenges around broadband connectivity in rural areas, health care access—particularly specialist services requiring long drives to Moncton or Fredericton—and the economic disruption caused by pandemic-era border closures, which severed daily cross-border ties between Edmundston and its American neighbours.