Joliette, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Joliette

Two very different territories share this Lanaudière seat. Most of the population lives in the built-up valley of the L'Assomption River around the city of Joliette, while the Regional County Municipality of Matawinie runs north from there deep into the Canadian Shield. Rawdon, Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez, Saint-Côme, Sainte-Émélie-de-l'Énergie and Saint-Michel-des-Saints string out along that northern axis, and the Atikamekw community of Manawan sits roughly 85 kilometres beyond the last of them.

Candidates

Pierre Paquette (Bloc Québécois) — An economist by training, Paquette taught at Cégep Maisonneuve before moving into the union movement, leading the Confédération des syndicats nationaux's Montreal central council in the second half of the 1980s and then serving eight years as the CSN's secretary general until 1998. He won Joliette in 2000 and was returned in 2004 and 2006. Michel Gauthier handed him the Bloc Québécois House leadership in April 2007, and he carried the party's international trade, globalization and financial institutions files into the 2008 campaign.

Sylvie Lavallée (Conservative) — Lavallée stood for the Conservatives in a region that had voted Bloc Québécois federally since the early 1990s.

Suzie St-Onge (Liberal) — St-Onge carried the Liberal banner in Joliette.

Francine Raynault (NDP) — Born in 1945 and living at Crabtree, Raynault held diplomas in commerce, business management and business law, and made her living from the land, selling her own produce and putting up preserves for sale. She had belonged to the Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale since 1977 and was its regional president in Lanaudière from 1997 to 2001, and she helped organise women farmers and agricultural producers in the Nouvelle-Acadie country south of Joliette. This was her first federal campaign.

Annie Durette ran for the Green Party.

About the Riding

Joliette itself holds close to 20,000 residents and works as the administrative capital of Lanaudière, with a courthouse, government offices, a CEGEP campus, the Musée d'art de Joliette, and the regional hospital just over the municipal line in Saint-Charles-Borromée. Its best-known institution reaches well beyond the region: the Festival de Lanaudière, founded in 1978, is the largest classical music festival in the country, and since July 1989 its main concerts have been staged at an open-air amphitheatre in a wooded park above the L'Assomption River. Manufacturing still matters here, led by the Bridgestone tire plant, which began production in 1966 as a Firestone factory and is the largest private employer in Lanaudière.

North of the built-up zone the character changes completely. Matawinie is forest, lake and outfitting country, oriented toward logging, hunting and cottage tourism around Lac Taureau and the wildlife reserves beyond. That economy was under strain heading into the 2008 vote. Quebec's forest-products slump had idled mills across the province, and the Louisiana-Pacific oriented strand board mill at Saint-Michel-des-Saints, which employed a little over 200 people, shut indefinitely in August 2006 and was closed permanently the following autumn. Farther north again, Manawan is home to some two thousand Atikamekw on a reserve of under eight square kilometres, where housing, road access and the delivery of federally funded services were long-standing grievances. In the southern lowlands dairy and field crops still shape the landscape between Joliette, Crabtree and Saint-Thomas, while Rawdon draws seasonal and retired residents out of the Montreal area.