LaSalle—Émard, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

LaSalle—Émard

For twenty years this southwestern Montreal seat belonged to Paul Martin, who held it from 1988 through his years as finance minister and prime minister. He announced in February 2007 that he would not run again, and 2008 was the first campaign in two decades fought here without him on the ballot. The riding covers the borough of LaSalle along the St. Lawrence together with the Angrignon sector and parts of the Côte-Saint-Paul and Ville-Émard neighbourhoods in the borough of Le Sud-Ouest, which occupy the strip between the Lachine Canal and the aqueduct.

Candidates

Lise Zarac (Liberal) — Born in Montreal in 1950, Zarac came to the campaign from municipal office: recruited to run under Mayor Gérald Tremblay's banner, she was elected to the LaSalle borough council in 2005 and sat there until 2008, giving up the seat to seek the Liberal nomination once Paul Martin confirmed he was leaving. She had not previously run federally, and entered the campaign charged with holding a constituency that had been personally identified with its retiring member for a generation.

Frédéric Isaya (Bloc Québécois) — Isaya ran for the Bloc in a riding the party had never won, but where sovereigntist support had grown across the surrounding southwest of the island.

Béatrice Guay-Pepper (Conservative) — Guay-Pepper stood for the Conservatives, who were pressing for gains in Montreal after breaking through elsewhere in Quebec in 2006.

Amy Darwish (NDP) — Darwish carried the New Democratic banner in LaSalle—Émard.

Kristina Vitelli ran for the Green Party. Antoine Kaluzny ran as an independent, and the Marxist-Leninist Party also fielded a candidate.

About the Riding

LaSalle is the demographic weight of the district, a borough of roughly 74,000 people occupying the southernmost point of the Island of Montreal. It was an independent city until the 2002 municipal mergers and still reads as one, with its own commercial spine along Newman Boulevard, the Carrefour Angrignon shopping centre at its northern end, and a working belt of factories, warehouses and depots tucked between the residential streets and Highway 20. The population is mostly francophone, with a long-established anglophone minority, a substantial community of Italian origin and growing numbers of more recent arrivals — a combination that has never mapped neatly onto the federalist-sovereigntist divide.

The riverfront is the borough's defining feature. Parc des Rapides looks out on the Lachine Rapids and preserves the foundations of the 1897 generating station that first lit Montreal; the surrounding waters have been a protected migratory bird sanctuary since 1937 and hold one of the largest heron colonies in the region. Just upstream, the Honoré-Mercier Bridge carries Route 138 across to Kahnawake and the South Shore. The span over the St. Lawrence Seaway is a federal responsibility, and a major rehabilitation of it — agreed among Ottawa, Quebec and the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake — was getting under way in 2008, with traffic disruption on the crossing a chronic irritant for commuters on both sides.

Across the aqueduct, Côte-Saint-Paul and Ville-Émard are older, denser and poorer, built around rail yards and light industry that have thinned out over the decades and left a mix of small business, services and social housing near Parc Angrignon and its metro station. The combination — an established francophone working population, a sizeable anglophone and immigrant presence, and an industrial base exposed to the manufacturing losses of 2008 — made the riding less predictable than its long Liberal record suggested once its long-time member had gone.