Jeanne-Le Ber, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Jeanne-Le Ber

The riding is named for Jeanne Le Ber, daughter of the Montreal merchant Jacques Le Ber, who from 1695 lived as a recluse in a cell built against the chapel of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame and whose embroidered vestments are among the earliest works of art made in the colony. Her father held the seigneury of Saint-Paul on the island opposite; the Congrégation bought all of it by 1769, which is how Île-des-Soeurs came by its name. The riding combines the borough of Verdun, including that island, with the Sud-Ouest neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Little Burgundy, Pointe-Saint-Charles and eastern Côte-Saint-Paul. The Lachine Canal runs through the middle of it and the St. Lawrence forms its southern edge.

Candidates

Thierry St-Cyr (Bloc Québécois) — Born at La Plaine in 1977, St-Cyr took a degree in computer engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke with a period of study at the Université de technologie de Compiègne in France. He worked as a management consultant at CGI, was president and shareholder of an information technology firm, and from 2001 to 2006 handled quality and metrics at Motorola in Montreal. He fell narrowly short against Liberal Liza Frulla here in 2004, took the seat in 2006, and concentrated in the Commons on citizenship and immigration.

Christian P. Feuillette (Liberal) — Feuillette was the Liberal candidate.

Daniel Breton (NDP) — Born in Montreal in 1962, Breton studied political science at the Université de Montréal and UQAM and became one of Quebec's better-known environmental organizers. He founded Québec-Vert-Kyoto to press for action on climate commitments, helped found the Green Party of Quebec, and led the 2004 campaign against Hydro-Québec's proposed Suroît gas-fired generating station at Beauharnois, which the provincial government abandoned that November. In June 2007 he called for the resignation of federal Environment Minister John Baird over Ottawa's handling of the Kyoto Protocol.

Daniel Beaudin (Conservative) — Beaudin, of Verdun, stood for the Conservatives.

Véronik Sansoucy (Green Party) — Sansoucy carried the Green Party banner.

Darryl Gray (Independent) — Gray, a minister of religion, ran as an independent candidate.

About the Riding

The Lachine Canal made this district and then unmade it. After the waterway opened in 1825 it supplied both transport and water power, and the banks filled with foundries, rolling mills and rail shops; the Grand Trunk and Canadian National works at Pointe-Saint-Charles employed generations. French Canadians settled Saint-Henri and Côte-Saint-Paul, Irish immigrants filled the Pointe, and from the end of the nineteenth century a community grew up in Little Burgundy around railway portering work — the neighbourhood that produced Oscar Peterson.

The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 and the canal closed to shipping in 1970. Factories shut, expressway construction erased whole blocks, the population fell steeply, and for two decades these were among the poorest postal codes in Canada.

The reversal began when the canal reopened to pleasure craft in 2002 and the old industrial buildings started being converted. By 2008 condominium development along the water was well advanced and the tension between longtime tenants and new owners had become the defining local argument. Tenant and housing groups in Pointe-Saint-Charles were among the most organized in the city, and federal social-housing money and the remediation of contaminated industrial land mattered here in concrete terms.

Verdun, incorporated in 1875 and the largest single component of the riding, is a dense grid of walk-up triplexes along the river with Wellington Street as its commercial spine. Cheap housing and industrial work made it majority English-speaking by the 1920s; it is now roughly two-thirds francophone. Île-des-Soeurs, reached by bridge from Verdun, is a separate world of towers, offices and single-family housing, considerably more affluent than the rest of the constituency.

That mix of a large anglophone and allophone electorate, a working-class core and a wealthy island suburb made Jeanne-Le Ber one of the more evenly divided seats in Montreal, and one where the federalist vote had kept every contest close.