Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Châteauguay—Saint-Constant

Châteauguay—Saint-Constant took in the whole of the Roussillon county municipality apart from Candiac, La Prairie and Saint-Philippe at its eastern end: the city of Châteauguay itself along with Delson, Léry, Mercier, Saint-Constant, Saint-Isidore, Saint-Mathieu and Sainte-Catherine, and the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake — roughly 300 square kilometres of South Shore suburb and farmland facing Montreal across the Lachine Rapids.

Candidates

Carole Freeman (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Saint-Urbain in January 1949 and a lawyer by profession, Freeman lived at Léry and won the riding in 2006, succeeding fellow Bloc member Denise Poirier-Rivard, who had held it through the single Parliament since the seat was created in 2004. She was defending it for the first time.

Linda Schwey (Liberal) — A chartered accountant, Schwey ran for the Liberals.

Pierre-Paul Routhier (Conservative) — Routhier, of Châteauguay, was the Conservative candidate.

Sonia Jurado (NDP) — Jurado stood for the New Democrats.

Brian Sarwer-Foner (Green) — Sarwer-Foner carried the Green Party's nomination.

About the Riding

Châteauguay, with better than forty thousand residents, is the population centre and one of the more bilingual communities in the Montérégie: roughly a quarter of its people grew up speaking English, a share well above the regional norm. The city takes its name from the seigneury on the Châteauguay River. The battle of 26 October 1813, when Charles-Michel de Salaberry's Voltigeurs and militia turned back a far larger American column marching on Montreal, was fought on that same river about fifty kilometres upstream, at Allan's Corners, well outside the riding.

Growth arrived with the bridges — the Mercier in 1934, the Champlain in 1962 — which turned farm parishes into commuter suburbs within a generation. The riding's industrial anchor is an unusual one: Hydro-Québec's Châteauguay converter station, in service since 1984, is the largest back-to-back high-voltage direct current installation in North America, rated at a thousand megawatts and used to move power between the Quebec grid and New York State. Sainte-Catherine sits on the St. Lawrence Seaway, where the Côte Sainte-Catherine lock lifts ocean vessels past the Lachine Rapids. Saint-Constant is home to Exporail, the country's largest railway museum, whose Angus exhibition pavilion opened in 2004 around a collection of some 160 pieces of rolling stock. Delson and Léry are small. Mercier and Saint-Isidore keep a working agricultural base, and Mercier has been dealing since the late 1960s with groundwater contaminated by used oils dumped into lagoons in an old sand pit — a file that has repeatedly pulled in both levels of government and that has kept a pumping and treatment plant running since 1984.

Kahnawake is a permanent fact of local politics. About eight thousand people live in the community, which sits between Châteauguay and the Honoré-Mercier Bridge, and the blockade of that bridge during the 1990 confrontation at Oka, together with the ugly scenes on the Châteauguay side that accompanied it, left a mark on relations that federal governments and local leaders have worked at since. Heading into October 2008, though, the questions candidates fielded most often were the ordinary ones of a commuter suburb: bridge and highway capacity, transit funding, pensions and seniors' benefits, and what the autumn's financial turmoil would mean for households and for manufacturing jobs across the South Shore.