La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

La Pointe-de-l'Île

Refinery stacks and river frontage define the eastern extremity of the Island of Montreal. This riding takes in the Pointe-aux-Trembles side of the borough of Rivière-des-Prairies—Pointe-aux-Trembles, the small independent city of Montréal-Est, and the eastern parts of Mercier-Est and Longue-Pointe in the borough of Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Water surrounds it on three sides: the Rivière des Prairies to the north, the St. Lawrence to the east and south.

Candidates

Francine Lalonde (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Saint-Hyacinthe in 1940, Lalonde worked as a teacher, lecturer and trade unionist before entering politics. She was minister responsible for the status of women in René Lévesque's government from January to June 1985, resigning after losing a by-election in Bertrand to Robert Bourassa, and ran for the Parti Québécois again in Saint-Henri in 1989. She went to Ottawa for the Bloc Québécois in 1993 as member for Mercier and moved to this seat when it was carved out in the 2003 redistribution. By 2008 she was the party's foreign affairs critic, having earlier handled human resources development and industry. Outside Quebec she was best known for Bill C-407, the private member's bill to legalise assisted suicide that she introduced in June 2005; she brought it back in June 2008 as Bill C-562, and it died again when Parliament was dissolved.

Oumy Sarr (Liberal) — Sarr ran for the Liberals in a part of Montreal that had returned Bloc Québécois members without interruption since 1993.

Isabelle Maguire (NDP) — Maguire carried the New Democratic banner in Montreal's east end.

Hubert Pichet (Conservative) — A lawyer who had practised for the Canadian Forces and Canada Post as well as privately, and who lectured on human resources, Pichet was a long-standing Conservative organiser who spent three years in the 1980s as an assistant in Brian Mulroney's office.

Domita Cundari stood for the Green Party. Candidates also came forward from the satirical neorhino.ca party and the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Montréal-Est is the smallest and most unusual piece of the district. A municipality of a few thousand residents, it voted to leave the City of Montreal and recovered its independent status on 1 January 2006, and it has been one of Canada's most concentrated petrochemical sites since the interwar years. Shell Canada's refinery there opened in 1933 and was rebuilt through the 2000s with new desulphurisation units, reaching a capacity of about 161,000 barrels a day and employing more than 450 people directly. A second large refinery, Petro-Canada's, sits just up the shoreline in Pointe-aux-Trembles. Earlier operators — BP, Gulf, Texaco — had pulled out over previous decades, leaving contaminated land and a durable local suspicion about the sector's staying power.

Ottawa is a landlord here as well as a regulator. The Longue-Pointe garrison on Notre-Dame Street East, which houses the army's eastern supply depot and the headquarters of its Montreal-area reserve brigade, is one of the largest federal establishments on the island and employs soldiers and civilians in the low thousands. A short distance east, the Louis-H. Lafontaine psychiatric hospital occupies another large tract in Mercier-Est.

Pointe-aux-Trembles is the population centre and reads as a town rather than a neighbourhood: densities well below the Montreal average, a high rate of homeownership, and a commercial strip along Notre-Dame doing the work a downtown would do elsewhere. What would replace refinery and factory work if the sector contracted, how far Ottawa would go on employment insurance for older manufacturing workers, and who would pay to clean the former industrial sites were the questions with the most local traction in 2008.