Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Beauharnois—Salaberry

South-west of Montreal, this Montérégie riding ran from the Beauharnois Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway down to the New York and Ontario borders. It combined three regional county municipalities of very different character — industrial Beauharnois-Salaberry, the vegetable-growing Jardins-de-Napierville, and the thinly settled, partly English-speaking Haut-Saint-Laurent — along with the Quebec portion of the Akwesasne Mohawk territory. Its 2,448 square kilometres held 106,856 people at the 2006 census, close to nine in ten of whom spoke only French at home.

Candidates

Claude Debellefeuille (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield on 13 December 1963 and living at Ormstown in the Haut-Saint-Laurent, Debellefeuille worked as a social worker before entering politics. She won the riding in January 2006, succeeding the Bloc's Alain Boire, and was seeking a second term.

Dominique Bellemare (Conservative) — A lawyer from Beauharnois, Bellemare had carried the Conservative banner here in 2004 and was standing again.

Maria Lopez (Liberal) — Lopez, of Hemmingford, gave her occupation as an interviewer and was the Liberal candidate.

Anne Minh Thu Quach (NDP) — Born at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield in August 1982, Quach came out of the Cégep de Valleyfield with a health sciences diploma in 2001 and out of the Université de Sherbrooke with a bachelor's degree in secondary education in 2005. She taught French at the École Edgar-Hébert, a secondary school in her home city, and was making her first run for public office.

David Smith (Green Party) — A computer specialist from Hemmingford, Smith carried the Green banner for the second election running.

About the Riding

Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, the largest city in the riding at just under 40,000 people, had absorbed a heavy blow before the campaign began. On 4 January 2007 Goodyear announced the end of tire production at its Valleyfield plant, cutting about 800 of some 1,000 jobs and leaving roughly 200 at a rubber-mixing operation. A rescue package worth more than $90 million, put to the company that October, was turned down in December, and a payroll of about $50 million disappeared from the local economy. That loss followed the long fade of the textile trade that had built the city around the Montreal Cotton Company mill, planned in 1874 and for most of a century the largest cotton complex in Canada.

To the south-west, Huntingdon had been through worse. In December 2004 Cleyn & Tinker and Huntingdon Mills announced the closing of six textile plants in a town of about 2,600, eliminating close to 800 jobs; one mill shut within the week and the rest through the spring of 2005. International textile quotas expired on 1 January 2005, and with the dollar climbing, trade policy was not an abstract question in the Haut-Saint-Laurent.

Not everything was in retreat. The Beauharnois generating station, built in three phases between 1929 and 1961 on a purpose-dug canal and taken over by Hydro-Québec at the 1944 nationalisation, ran 36 turbine-generator units for an installed capacity of about 1,900 megawatts, which made it the fifth-largest plant in the provincial system; it was designated a national historic site in 1990. Seaway locks carried ocean-going traffic past the rapids, and manufacturing still accounted for a share of local employment well above the national average.

South and east, the Jardins-de-Napierville holds the largest expanse of cultivated black earth in Quebec and supplies much of the province's field-vegetable crop — lettuce, onions, carrots and celery for the Montreal market — drawing seasonal workers from Mexico and Guatemala each summer. Dairy, beef and row crops dominate the Haut-Saint-Laurent. The Cégep de Valleyfield was the riding's only post-secondary institution and a community anchor.

Akwesasne, straddling the Quebec, Ontario and New York boundaries, made cross-border jurisdiction a standing federal file; the Mohawk Council had resolved in February 2008 to bar Canada Border Services officers from carrying firearms on the territory, and the dispute was unresolved when the writ dropped. Manufacturing job losses, employment insurance, agricultural support and infrastructure spending framed the rest of the debate in October 2008.