Berthier—Maskinongé, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Berthier—Maskinongé

A ladder of river towns and back-country parishes on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, this riding straddled the boundary between the Lanaudière and Mauricie regions. It joined the D'Autray and Maskinongé regional county municipalities to the western edge of Trois-Rivières, running from Lavaltrie and Lanoraie at the Montreal end through Berthierville and Louiseville to Saint-Étienne-des-Grès and the former towns of Pointe-du-Lac and Trois-Rivières-Ouest, and reaching north into the foothills at Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, Mandeville and Saint-Alexis-des-Monts. The name is older than the district: it was carried by a seat abolished in 1987 and revived by the 2003 redistribution out of pieces of Trois-Rivières, Berthier—Montcalm and Saint-Maurice. Its 3,580 square kilometres held 107,911 people at the 2006 census, almost all of them francophone.

Candidates

Guy André (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal in November 1959 and living at Pointe-du-Lac, André took a bachelor's degree in social work at UQAM and a master's at Université Laval, and had worked as a social worker, coordinator, mediator, teacher and political assistant. He won the seat when it was revived for the 2004 election and held it in 2006. He was seeking a third term.

Marie-Claude Godue (Conservative) — A businesswoman from Saint-Léon-le-Grand with a recreology degree from the University of Ottawa, Godue had been active in the party for a quarter of a century and had served as a ministerial assistant to Robert de Cotret under the Clark and Mulroney governments. She had carried the Conservative banner here in 2006 and was standing again.

Jean-Luc Matteau (Liberal) — An engineer working as a technical adviser and living at Charette, Matteau was the Liberal candidate.

André Chauvette (NDP) — Chauvette, of Saint-Gabriel, managed crime-prevention projects and stood for the New Democrats.

Denis Lefebvre (Green Party) — A veterinarian from Trois-Rivières, Lefebvre ran for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Three things carried the local economy: farming, furniture and the woods. The St. Lawrence lowlands between Lanoraie and Yamachiche are good dairy and grain country, and the Maskinongé RCM alone gathers seventeen municipalities across some 2,600 square kilometres, running from the Lac Saint-Pierre plain to the edge of La Mauricie national park with better than six hundred lakes in between. Supply management, farm succession and the cost of production quota were standing concerns in the farming belt.

Furniture manufacturing was the riding's distinctive industry. Meubles Canadel, founded at Louiseville in 1982, had grown into one of the largest dining-room furniture makers on the continent and employed several hundred people in the town. Groupe Bermex, founded at Maskinongé a year later, ran a string of plants across the region from its base there. The wider Mauricie furniture sector counted more than sixty firms and upwards of two thousand workers, and by 2008 it was under sustained pressure from the high Canadian dollar and low-cost imports.

Berthierville, seat of the D'Autray RCM, sits opposite the Berthier islands at the head of Lac Saint-Pierre, a Ramsar wetland since 1998 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2000, and is home to the museum devoted to the racing driver Gilles Villeneuve, who was brought there as a boy and made the town his own. Louiseville, the only city among the Maskinongé municipalities and the market centre for the surrounding parishes, retains a stock of nineteenth-century houses along the Chemin du Roy. The northern half of the riding — Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, Mandeville and the lake country beyond — leaned on forestry, outfitting and cottage tourism, with seasonal work and a short operating year; Saint-Alexis-des-Monts roughly doubles its population in summer.

This was an ageing constituency, its median age 45.6 years against 41.9 for Quebec as a whole. The exception was the commuter belt at the Montreal end, where Lavaltrie had grown by more than half since the early 1990s as suburban development pushed east along Autoroute 40. Heading into 14 October 2008, the issues most often raised were employment insurance for seasonal and laid-off workers, the competitiveness of the furniture and wood industries, agricultural support, and federal services for older people living well away from the larger towns.