Gatineau, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Gatineau

The riding corresponds exactly to the pre-amalgamation City of Gatineau, which sits east of Hull on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. When five municipalities — Hull, Aylmer, Gatineau, Buckingham and Masson-Angers — merged on 1 January 2002 to form the present city, the old Gatineau was the largest of them. It is a compact, densely settled constituency by Quebec standards, and one whose working population is bound to the federal capital across the river.

Candidates

Richard Nadeau (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Hawkesbury, Ontario, in 1959, Nadeau took University of Ottawa degrees in history, political science and education. He taught at École secondaire publique Gisèle-Lalonde in Orléans, on the Ontario side, where he ran the model United Nations club, and worked variously as an education adviser, program director, researcher and archivist, campaigning along the way for French-language schooling in Ontario. He won Gatineau in 2006 on his third attempt at a seat, becoming the first Bloc Québécois member returned from the National Capital Region, and was defending it as the incumbent.

Françoise Boivin (NDP) — Born in Hull in 1960, Boivin studied social sciences and civil law at the University of Ottawa and was called to the Quebec Bar in 1984. She practised at Beaudry, Bertrand, co-founded Letellier & Associés and opened her own labour-law office in 2000, and from 1998 hosted public-affairs programming on CJRC radio. Elected as the Liberal member for Gatineau in 2004, she chaired the Liberal women's caucus and came out early against Canadian participation in the American missile defence programme, a position the party later settled on. Nadeau defeated her in 2006. On 25 February 2008 she announced she would seek the seat for the New Democrats, having learned the Liberals intended to parachute a star candidate into the riding; Thomas Mulcair approached her and a meeting with Jack Layton settled it.

Michel Simard (Liberal) — Simard carried the Liberal banner in Gatineau.

Denis Tassé (Conservative) — Tassé was the Conservative candidate.

David Inglis (Green Party) — Inglis stood for the Green Party.

About the Riding

The federal government is the dominant fact of economic life here. The Outaouais received a large share of departmental offices under decentralization policies from the 1970s onward, and thousands of the riding's residents work for federal departments and agencies on one side of the river or the other. Pulp and paper, which built the Outaouais in the nineteenth century, had long since been displaced by the public service as the region's employment base.

That produces a distinctive politics. Questions that pass unnoticed elsewhere in Quebec — bilingualism requirements in federal hiring, the pace of public-service staffing, the treatment of federal employees' collective agreements — carry direct electoral weight. So does the daily problem of getting to work: the interprovincial bridges linking Gatineau to Ottawa were already congested, and where an additional crossing should go had been argued over for years without resolution.

The riding is heavily francophone, with a small anglophone minority and a growing immigrant population, and its households skew younger than the Quebec average, reflecting the subdivisions that expanded east of the old city core through the 1980s and 1990s. Boulevard Maloney and Autoroute 50 are its main east-west arteries.

Gatineau was one of the few Quebec seats where three parties could each claim a serious chance. The Liberals had held it until 2006 and the Bloc had taken it that year; the New Democrats, never previously a factor on the Quebec side of the river, were now running the riding's former Liberal member. Heading into October 2008, with the sovereignty question quiet and the economy deteriorating, the contest turned on which of the three could assemble a plurality in a constituency where federalist and sovereigntist voters live in the same suburbs.