Hochelaga, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Hochelaga

East-end Montreal's oldest industrial quarter gives this riding its name and its character. Hochelaga covers Hochelaga-Maisonneuve in the borough of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, runs west along the river to the eastern edge of Ville-Marie, and reaches north across Rosemont Boulevard to pick up a wedge of Rosemont. The Olympic Park and its stadium tower stand at the northern end, visible from most of the constituency.

Candidates

Réal Ménard (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal in 1962, Ménard holds bachelor's and master's degrees in political science and a law degree from the University of Ottawa. He first stood for office in 1984 as a Parti nationaliste du Québec candidate in Hochelaga—Maisonneuve, then won the seat for the Bloc in 1993 and was returned in 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006. Over fifteen years in the Commons he served as his party's critic for health, labour, national defence, citizenship and immigration, and justice. On 15 February 1994, in an exchange about the government's plans for the electronic highway and the place of French on it, he became the first member to use the word "internet" in a House of Commons debate. He was seeking a sixth term.

Diane Dicaire (Liberal) — Dicaire was the Liberal candidate in Hochelaga.

Jean-Claude Rocheleau (NDP) — Rocheleau stood for the New Democrats.

Luc Labbé (Conservative) — Labbé carried the Conservative banner.

Philippe Larochelle (Green Party) — Larochelle was the Green Party candidate.

Candidates from neorhino.ca and from the Communist, Radical Marijuana and Marxist-Leninist parties also appeared on the ballot.

About the Riding

Maisonneuve was founded in 1883, when the neighbouring town of Hochelaga voted itself into Montreal and the landowners further east chose to stay out. Shoe factories, textile mills, tobacco works and food plants went up along the rail lines, and by 1910 the town ranked fifth among Canada's industrial cities. Its promoters then set out to build a model city along Avenue Morgan, with a town hall, public baths, a fire station, a great park and the Beaux-Arts market hall Marius Dufresne designed between 1912 and 1914 — a stock of grand public buildings out of proportion to the neighbourhood that inherited them when Maisonneuve, by then in financial trouble, was annexed to Montreal in 1918.

The east-west expressway approach driven through in 1967 cleared roughly two thousand buildings, and from the early 1980s the factories closed in quick succession. What followed was three decades of concentrated hardship: by the 2000s the district had some of the lowest household incomes in Montreal, visible street prostitution and drug dealing along Sainte-Catherine Est, and a recent history as contested ground during the biker war of the 1990s. Community organizations working on food security, social housing and tenant rights are unusually thick on the ground, and their budgets depend heavily on federal transfers and program envelopes.

The Olympic Park is both the riding's landmark and one of its larger employers. The stadium's unfinished tower, its recurring roof failures and its long-term use had been a public argument in Montreal for three decades, and the federal government's stake in the site periodically resurfaced.

Signs of change were appearing around Place Simon-Valois by 2008, where new cafés and shops had begun to open, but the balance between reinvestment and displacement was contested in a district where a large share of residents rent.

The riding is close to uniformly French-speaking and had voted Bloc Québécois in every general election since the party's founding. Local federal concerns going into October 2008 were social housing construction, the adequacy of support for community groups, employment insurance eligibility for part-time and seasonal workers, and the summer's arts and culture funding reductions, which landed hard in a district full of small production companies and artists' studios.