Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles

Seen from the air, the seventeenth century is still legible in Charlesbourg: a square of common land ringed by house lots fanning outward like spokes, the trait-carré laid out in 1665 on a seigneury, Notre-Dame-des-Anges, that the Jesuits had been granted in 1626. The federal riding built around that borough occupied the northern reaches of Quebec City and also took in the eastern part of La Haute-Saint-Charles, including the Saint-Émile and Lac-Saint-Charles sectors.

Candidates

Daniel Petit (Conservative) — Born at Doische, in Belgium, in September 1948, Petit studied at Université Laval and joined the Quebec bar in 1973. He built a practice in labour and administrative law as a founding partner of the firm Petit, Beaudoin, and had been organising for conservative parties since the 1980s, beginning with the Progressive Conservatives. He took the seat from Bloc Québécois member Richard Marceau in 2006 and was seeking a second term.

Denis Courteau (Bloc Québécois) — Courteau, a Quebec City resident, ran for the Bloc.

Denise Legros (Liberal) — Legros, also of Quebec City, was the Liberal candidate.

Anne-Marie Day (NDP) — Born at Grande-Rivière in 1954, Day held a bachelor's degree in education and a master's in local and regional development from Université Laval. She had run an employment agency and had led a women's organisation in the Capitale-Nationale region.

François Bédard (Green) — Bédard stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Charlesbourg was farm country — market gardens, dairy and poultry supplying the Quebec City market — well into the twentieth century, then a summer retreat for city families, then a suburb. It counted 72,814 residents at the 2006 census across sixty-six square kilometres, which had made it one of the larger municipalities in the region before the 2002 amalgamation folded it, along with Saint-Émile and Lac-Saint-Charles, into the enlarged city. Shopping concentrates at Les Galeries Charlesbourg and along the boulevards running north from the old core, and government offices are a significant local presence in a metropolitan area where the public sector is the single biggest employer.

The district is almost entirely French-speaking, and household incomes sit near the provincial middle. Moving north, the built-up grid gives way to lakes and wooded ridges at the edge of the Laurentians: Lac-Saint-Charles grew up around its lake and Saint-Émile was a town in its own right, both absorbed into Quebec City in the same round of mergers.

Two things shaped the federal contest here in 2008. The first was the Conservative position in the Quebec City region. The party had broken through across the capital's suburbs in 2006 after years of irrelevance in the province, and Petit's re-election bid was part of a broader test of whether that new base would hold in a district the Bloc had previously owned. The second was Quebec City's four-hundredth anniversary, marked through the summer of 2008 with substantial federal money behind the programming and the associated waterfront and heritage work — an unusually visible federal presence in the months before the vote. Cutting against that, the government's summer decision to end a series of federal arts and culture programmes became a persistent campaign issue across Quebec, and the capital's cultural sector was among the more vocal. Public service employment, health transfers and infrastructure for the growing northern suburbs filled out the rest of the local agenda.