Lac-Saint-Louis, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Lac-Saint-Louis

Six independent municipalities and part of a Montreal borough make up the far western end of the Island of Montreal. Beaconsfield, Pointe-Claire, Kirkland, Baie-d'Urfé, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Senneville sit here, along with the western section of the borough of Pierrefonds-Roxboro, wrapped by Lac Saint-Louis on the south, Lac des Deux Montagnes on the west and the Rivière des Prairies on the north.

Candidates

Francis Scarpaleggia (Liberal) — Born in Montreal in 1957 and raised in Laval and the Town of Mount Royal, Scarpaleggia took an honours degree in economics at McGill, a master's in the subject at Columbia and an MBA at Concordia. He worked at Petro-Canada and the computer manufacturer Comterm, spent time as a financial analyst with Bristol-Myers Squibb, and taught business administration at Dawson College. From 1994 to 2004 he was legislative assistant to Clifford Lincoln, the former Quebec environment minister who sat for the riding in Ottawa, and he took the seat himself when Lincoln stepped down in 2004. Fresh water became his subject in Parliament: he chaired a Liberal caucus group on it from 2005 and picked up the water policy critic's portfolio in 2007.

Andrea Paine (Conservative) — Paine graduated from Concordia University in 1985 with a double major in journalism and political science, then studied civil law at Université Laval. She worked for the Quebec ministers Yvon Vallières and Sam Elkas, and afterwards on Jean Charest's 1993 campaign for the federal Progressive Conservative leadership. She had already stood here in 2004 and 2006, and came to her third consecutive campaign from a job as a senior policy adviser.

Daniel Quinn (NDP) — Quinn founded the riding's New Democratic association in 2003 and won its nomination in January 2004, having done graduate work in history at Concordia. An educator by occupation, he too was contesting the seat for the third election running.

Peter Graham (Green Party), a Pointe-Claire educator who had also run here in 2004 and 2006, and Maxime Clément (Bloc Québécois) rounded out the ballot.

About the Riding

The Trans-Canada Highway corridor through Kirkland and Pointe-Claire is one of Canada's densest concentrations of pharmaceutical and technology employment. Merck Frosst Canada had its head office there, along with the Merck Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research, then the oldest and largest biomedical research facility in the country and among the twenty biggest corporate research spenders in Canada. Retail is the other anchor, with the Fairview Pointe-Claire centre serving shoppers from across the West Island, and a broad base of office and service employment fills out the rest.

At the western tip, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue holds McGill University's Macdonald Campus, the adjoining Morgan Arboretum and Ste. Anne's Hospital. Opened in 1917 for wounded veterans of the First World War, Ste. Anne's was by 2008 the last veterans' hospital still owned and run by the federal government, and its main pavilion was midway through a reconstruction begun in 2007 that turned open wards into 446 private rooms — a federal file with unusually direct local weight.

English is the mother tongue of a large share of residents and bilingualism is close to universal, a mix that has made Lac-Saint-Louis and its predecessor seats reliably federalist ground. Geography drives much of the rest: everything is strung along two highways and a commuter rail line, the municipalities that demerged from Montreal in 2006 were still sorting out which services they controlled, and water quality in the lake and protection of the remaining shoreline were the local questions with federal implications heading into October 2008.