Honoré-Mercier, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Honoré-Mercier

At the far east end of Montreal Island, Honoré-Mercier joins three quite different pieces of the city: the whole of the borough of Anjou, the Rivière-des-Prairies half of the borough of Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles, and the northern section of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Autoroutes 40 and 25 cross in the middle of it. The riding was created in 1987 as Anjou—Rivière-des-Prairies and given its present name in 2003.

Candidates

Pablo Rodriguez (Liberal) — Born at San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, in 1967, Rodriguez came to Canada at the age of eight after his family fled the military dictatorship; his father, an activist who had sought the governorship of Tucumán, had been repeatedly jailed. The family settled first in Montreal and then in Sherbrooke, where Rodriguez later took a business degree at the Université de Sherbrooke. He joined the Quebec Liberal youth wing at sixteen and rose to one of its vice-presidencies, and was a youth spokesman for the No side during the 1995 referendum. He worked in international development with the Montreal organization Club 2/3 and served as a vice-president of Oxfam-Québec from 2000 to 2004. Elected here in 2004 and re-elected in 2006, he chaired the Standing Committee on Official Languages and served as opposition critic for official languages and the Francophonie and for public works. His private member's bill obliging the government to publish an annual plan for meeting Canada's Kyoto Protocol commitments cleared the Commons in February 2007 and became law that June. He was the sitting member.

Gérard Labelle (Bloc Québécois) — Labelle was the Bloc Québécois candidate.

Rodrigo Alfaro (Conservative) — Alfaro stood for the Conservatives.

François Pilon (NDP) — Born in Laval in 1958 and educated at the Collège Montmorency, Pilon worked in architectural design and served as vice-president of the blue-collar workers' union of the City of Laval from late 1998 to 2006, helping bring the local into the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1999. He had contested Honoré-Mercier for the New Democrats in 2004 and 2006, and this was his third attempt.

Gaëtan Bérard (Green Party) — Bérard carried the Green Party banner.

About the Riding

Anjou was carved out of the parish of Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice in February 1956 and grew from about 9,500 residents at the end of that decade to more than 30,000 by the early 1970s, pulled along by the interchange where Autoroute 25 meets the Métropolitaine, by a large industrial park, and by Les Galeries d'Anjou, which opened in 1968 as the biggest shopping centre in Quebec. Anjou lost its independence in the municipal mergers of 2002 but kept a borough council and still functions as a distinct place, with a residential fabric of postwar bungalows and low-rise apartments. Its industrial park holds several hundred firms in manufacturing, wholesaling, transport and logistics.

The Rivière-des-Prairies portion of the riding is newer, more suburban in layout and considerably more diverse, with well-established Italian and Haitian communities. Settlement services, credential recognition and family-reunification processing at Citizenship and Immigration Canada are consequently live federal issues here in a way they are not in most east-end ridings. The northern strip of Mercier rounds out the constituency.

That mix produced an electorate francophone in daily life but demographically unlike the Bloc heartland around it, and the seat's record shows it: Progressive Conservative from 1988, Bloc Québécois from 1993, Liberal from 1997, and Liberal again under Rodriguez from 2004 while neighbouring ridings stayed with the Bloc.

Local preoccupations heading into the autumn vote included the aging expressway network and the absence of any Métro station in Anjou, the vitality of local commercial strips against the pull of the regional mall, and the security of manufacturing and warehousing jobs as the credit crisis took hold in September.