Brome—Missisquoi, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Brome—Missisquoi

Wedged against the Vermont border between Montreal and Sherbrooke, Brome—Missisquoi took in the whole of the Brome-Missisquoi regional county municipality and most of Memphrémagog. Roughly 3,045 square kilometres of orchard, dairy pasture, hardwood ridge and lake shore separated its principal towns — Cowansville, Bromont, Farnham, Magog, Lac-Brome, Sutton, Dunham and Bedford — and about 92,600 people lived in the district at the 2006 census.

Candidates

Christian Ouellet (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal in April 1934, Ouellet was seventy-four. An architect who joined the Ordre des architectes du Québec in 1969 and took a master's degree in building at the University of Manchester, he taught at the Université de Montréal, chaired the Solar Energy Society of Canada and had promoted energy-efficient housing since the early 1970s. He lost narrowly to Denis Paradis here in 2004, then unseated him in 2006, and spoke for the Bloc on social housing.

Denis Paradis (Liberal) — Paradis took commerce and law degrees at the University of Ottawa, was called to the bar in 1976 and headed the Quebec Bar in 1993. He won Brome—Missisquoi in a February 1995 by-election and held it for eleven years, chairing the Liberal Party's Quebec caucus and taking the financial institutions portfolio as a minister of state under Paul Martin. He was back for a rematch.

Mark Quinlan (Conservative) — Quinlan carried the Conservative nomination.

Christelle Bogosta (NDP) — Bogosta lived in Bedford and had worked with community organisations serving women and people in addiction treatment.

Pierre Brassard (Green) — Montreal-born, Brassard held a diploma in financial administration from the Université du Québec à Montréal and spent his working life at Hydro-Québec, from 1960 until 1996. He won a seat on Bromont council in a by-election in 2000.

David Marler (Independent) — A Lac-Brome lawyer, Marler had been the Conservative candidate here in 2006. He left the party in January 2008, saying he had refused roughly $30,000 routed through his campaign under the national party's advertising transfer arrangement because he could not get a clear explanation of what it was for, and that officials later told him he would not be renominated. The party rejected the accusation. He ran as an independent.

About the Riding

Cowansville, seat of the county municipality and of the judicial district of Bedford, began with the flour mill and sawmill Jacob Ruiter built on the Yamaska in 1800, grew as a service centre once the railway reached it in 1870, and became a textile town after the Bruck silk mills opened in 1922. It holds the regional hospital, the courthouse and a federal penitentiary, which makes Ottawa a direct employer there. Bromont, east on Autoroute 10, was assembled in 1964 by the Désourdy brothers out of West-Shefford and part of Adamsville and built deliberately around tourism, recreation and technology. IBM opened its plant there in 1972, and by 2008 the town's science park also held a General Electric aviation operation and the semiconductor foundry DALSA, alongside a ski hill and equestrian facilities. Farnham and Bedford serve the surrounding farm country. Lac-Brome, Sutton and Dunham depend heavily on tourism, second homes and the wineries strung along the region's wine route. Magog, at the north end of Lake Memphrémagog, anchors the Estrie end of the seat.

Agriculture here means dairy, apples and, increasingly, grapes, and the defence of supply management was a live federal question through the autumn of 2008, as were the manufacturing and forestry pressures bearing on Quebec plants that year. The riding carries one of the larger anglophone minorities in rural Quebec, a legacy of Loyalist and British settlement in the Townships, and cross-border traffic with Vermont makes federal border and customs policy a daily practicality rather than an abstraction.