Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel

Three pieces of country with little in common were joined here: the Argenteuil regional county municipality around Lachute, the Papineau RCM running west along the Ottawa River into the Outaouais, and the sprawling City of Mirabel north of Montreal. To these were added Oka, Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, Pointe-Calumet and Saint-Placide in the Deux-Montagnes RCM, together with the Mohawk lands of Kanesatake, and Morin-Heights, Saint-Adolphe-d'Howard, Wentworth-Nord and Lac-des-Seize-Îles in the Laurentian highlands. The result covered 5,200 square kilometres and held 111,534 people at the 2006 census, a number growing faster than in almost any other Quebec riding.

Candidates

Mario Laframboise (Bloc Québécois) — A notary born at Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in 1957, Laframboise took his law and notarial diplomas at the Université de Montréal, then spent seventeen years as mayor of his home municipality and thirteen as warden of the Papineau RCM, and led the Union des municipalités du Québec from 1997 until his election to the Commons in 2000. Re-elected in 2004 and 2006, he was the Bloc's transport and infrastructure critic and vice-chair of the Commons transport committee. He was running for a fourth term.

André Robert (Liberal) — A long-serving Treasury Board public servant living at Saint-André-Avellin, Robert carried the Liberal banner.

Scott Pearce (Conservative) — Mayor of the Township of Gore in the Argenteuil hills since November 2004 and the owner of a light-transport firm, Pearce was confirmed as the Conservative candidate the day after the election was called. He was the only contender besides the incumbent with a record in elected office.

Alain Senécal (NDP) — An automation technician from Mirabel, Senécal had carried the New Democratic banner here in 2006 and was making a second attempt.

Pierre Audette (Green Party) — A renovation contractor, Audette stood for the Greens.

The Marxist-Leninist Party also fielded a candidate, the student Christian-Simon Ferlatte.

About the Riding

Lachute anchored the eastern end. A town of a little under 12,000, it had grown up around the paper and woollen mills established on the Rivière du Nord in the 1880s, and by 2008 its industrial base ran to food processing, furniture and pleasure-boat building alongside the older wood trades. Downstream in the Outaouais, Thurso depended on its kraft pulp mill, a Fraser Papers operation employing about 350 people and drawing workers from across the Papineau RCM. The market for kraft pulp fell away during 2008, and the mill's prospects were a constant subject in local politics.

Mirabel was the riding's other economic pole. The last scheduled passenger flight left the airport on 31 October 2004, after which Aéroports de Montréal turned the site over to freight and aeronautical manufacturing. Bombardier's $170-million final assembly plant, opened on 22 October 2001 to build the CRJ700 and CRJ900 regional jets, employed as many as 1,700 people and was turning out between 55 and 75 aircraft a year through the middle of the decade. What to do with the expropriated farmland and the emptied passenger terminal remained an unresolved federal file, and Mirabel itself was among the faster-growing municipalities in the Laurentians.

Agriculture ran the length of the riding: dairy, grain and maple through the Petite-Nation and the Argenteuil valleys, and apple orchards around Oka and Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, which alone counted sixteen of them. The northern reaches near Morin-Heights, Saint-Adolphe-d'Howard and Wentworth-Nord were chalet and ski country, dependent on seasonal visitors from Montreal and Ottawa.

About one resident in thirteen gave English as a mother tongue, nearly all of them in Argenteuil around Lachute, Brownsburg and Grenville, where Scottish and Irish families had settled after landing at Carillon between the 1830s and the 1860s. Grenville Township itself dates from 1808.

Kanesatake, adjoining Oka, gave land claims and Indigenous policing an immediacy few Quebec ridings shared, the seventy-eight-day standoff of 1990 being within living memory of most voters. Heading into 14 October 2008, the questions raised most often were the state of the forest industry, aerospace employment at Mirabel, farm income and supply management, and rural infrastructure spending across a territory where distances are long and municipal tax bases small.