Alfred-Pellan, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Alfred-Pellan

Eastern Laval faces Montreal across the Rivière des Prairies and backs onto the Rivière des Mille Îles, and this riding held the whole of that flank — some 119 square kilometres and about 105,000 people at the 2006 census. It took in Pont-Viau and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul along the southern shore, Duvernay, the eastern half of Vimont, and the thinly built north-eastern sector of Saint-François. The name comes from the painter Alfred Pellan, and dates from the 2003 redistribution; the territory had been the riding of Laval East.

Candidates

Robert Carrier (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal on 3 June 1941 and living in Laval, Carrier trained as an engineer and worked as a political adviser and project coordinator. He took the redrawn seat in 2004, defeating the Liberal member for Laval East, Carole-Marie Allard, and held it in 2006. He was standing for a third term.

Wilson Saintelmy (Liberal) — A Laval businessman, Saintelmy carried the Liberal banner.

Alexandre Salameh (Conservative) — An engineer with degrees from the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, the École Polytechnique de Montréal and HEC Montréal, Salameh was chosen as the Conservative candidate by acclamation at a nomination meeting in late February 2008 and spent the spring and summer working the riding before the writ was issued.

Cynthia Roy (NDP) — Roy, who lived at Mirabel rather than in the riding, stood for the New Democrats.

Tristan Desjardins Drouin (Green Party) — A student, Desjardins Drouin ran for the Greens.

Régent Millette, a teacher, also stood. He had run as an independent in Laval East in 2000, in this riding in 2004 and in Outremont in 2006, and for the Laval mayoralty in 2005.

About the Riding

Roughly seven residents in ten gave French as their mother tongue, and better than a fifth gave a language other than English or French — a higher share of the second than most of Laval.

The riding's character changed sharply from south to north. Pont-Viau and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul are dense older quarters set hard against the Rivière des Prairies, joined to the island by the Pont Viau and the Pont Papineau-Leblanc. Duvernay and eastern Vimont are subdivisions of the 1960s and after, laid out for cars. Saint-François, in the north-east corner, remained partly agricultural and was the least built-up part of the city.

Two federal properties gave the constituency an unusual profile. The Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary, opened in 1873 in buildings first put up as a reformatory, had stood empty since its closure in 1989 and was designated a national historic site the year after. Its walled grounds occupied a large block of riverfront land whose future nobody in Ottawa had settled; the site had been shut to visitors in 2007 when mould was found in the buildings. The Laval immigration holding centre, the only facility of its kind in Quebec and one of three in the country, was also inside the boundaries, which gave detention policy and refugee determination a direct local presence.

Laval's economy rested on retail, construction, health care and light manufacturing rather than any single dominant employer, and its largest workplaces — the Cité de la Santé hospital and the main industrial parks — lay in the western half of the city, outside the riding. Daily life for a great many residents meant commuting to Montreal. The metro extension into Laval had opened to passengers on 28 April 2007 after a project costing some $745 million, but bus service, bridge capacity and highway congestion remained standing grievances in the eastern sectors.

Heading into 14 October 2008 the questions raised most often were the ones a suburban riding of modest means tends to raise: the cost of housing, employment insurance for workers displaced by a manufacturing slowdown the high dollar had aggravated, immigration processing times, and federal money for transit and roads. The autumn credit crisis added an anxiety about savings and jobs that cut across all of them.