Brossard—La Prairie, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Brossard—La Prairie

Four municipalities on the south bank of the St. Lawrence made up Brossard—La Prairie: the cities of Brossard, La Prairie and Candiac, plus the municipality of Saint-Philippe, together 168 square kilometres of Montérégie between the river and the farmland beyond Autoroute 30. The Champlain Bridge ties the district to downtown Montreal and sets the daily rhythm for tens of thousands of commuters.

Candidates

Alexandra Mendes (Liberal) — Born in Lisbon in November 1963, Mendes came to Canada with her family in 1978, at the age of fifteen. She spent some fifteen years at the Maison Internationale de la Rive-Sud, a South Shore settlement agency for immigrants and refugees, taught at the Portuguese school in Brossard, worked as a constituency assistant to Jacques Saada, the Liberal who held the riding from 1997 to 2006, and put in eight months as a Quebec organiser for Bob Rae's leadership campaign.

Marcel Lussier (Bloc Québécois) — An engineer with a master's in health engineering from the École Polytechnique and a civil engineering degree from the Université de Sherbrooke, Lussier took the seat from Saada in 2006 by about two points and served as the Bloc's environment critic in the Parliament that followed. He was defending the riding for the first time.

Maurice Brossard (Conservative) — Brossard, of La Prairie, held the Conservative nomination.

Hoang Mai (NDP) — Born in Montreal in June 1973 to parents who had emigrated from Vietnam, Mai completed a law degree and a master's in private international law with a notarial option at the Université de Montréal in 1996, then trained in international law at The Hague. He joined an international firm in 1998 and worked on assignments in Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong before returning to Montreal in 2001; he had practised as a notary since 2002.

Sonia Ziadé (Green) — Ziadé, of Brossard, stood for the Green Party.

The Marxist-Leninist Party nominated Normand Chouinard.

About the Riding

Brossard supplies most of the riding's population. Constituted in February 1958 under its first mayor, Georges-Henri Brossard, and named for a landowning family recorded in the area from 1766, it is among the most varied municipalities in Greater Montreal: more than twenty ethnic origins each account for at least one resident in a hundred, and about one in nine reported Chinese origin at the 2006 census. Retail and services drive the local economy. Boulevard Taschereau carries a dense strip of shops and an unusually large concentration of car dealerships; Champlain Mall, open since 1975, and Place Portobello pull regional traffic; and the Quartier DIX30 open-air complex, whose first phase opened in September 2006 where Autoroutes 10 and 30 meet, had quickly become one of the largest retail developments in the country. An industrial park hosts light manufacturing and distribution.

La Prairie is far older. The seigneury of La Prairie de la Magdeleine was granted to the Jesuits in 1647, and the Vieux-La Prairie quarter still preserves stone houses and a parish church from the colonial period. On 21 July 1836 the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad began running from La Prairie to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the first railway line in British North America. Candiac and Saint-Philippe, laid out much later, added subdivisions steadily through the 2000s.

Because so many residents cross the river to work, federal transport questions dominated local concern in 2008 — above all the condition and cost of the federally owned Champlain Bridge and the long-standing case for extending rapid transit to the South Shore. Settlement and language services mattered in Brossard's newer communities, and the autumn's financial turmoil sharpened arguments about jobs and credit across the district.