Laurentides—Labelle, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Laurentides—Labelle

Stretching from ski country an hour north of Montreal to the edge of the Quebec hinterland, this is one of the province's larger southern ridings by area. It covers the Regional County Municipalities of Antoine-Labelle and Les Laurentides plus the eastern part of Les Pays-d'en-Haut, taking in Saint-Sauveur, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Val-David, Mont-Tremblant and, far to the north, Mont-Laurier and the small municipalities of the upper Rouge and Lièvre valleys.

Candidates

Johanne Deschamps (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Saint-Jovite in 1959, Deschamps worked as an administrative assistant and political attaché. She sat on the Val-Barrette municipal council from 1994 to 2004 and served as a commissioner of the Pierre-Neveu school board in Mont-Laurier from 1998 to 2004, and made a first federal attempt in Pontiac—Gatineau—Labelle in 2000 before winning this seat for the Bloc Québécois in 2004. She held it in 2006 and was seeking a third term.

Pierre Gfeller (Liberal) — A physician living at Nominingue, in the Antoine-Labelle country north of Mont-Tremblant, Gfeller gave the Liberals a candidate rooted in the remote half of the riding rather than the resort belt.

Guy Joncas (Conservative) — A businessman from Mont-Tremblant, Joncas ran for the Conservatives in the resort belt at the southern end of the riding.

David Dupras (NDP) and Jacques Rigal (Green Party) also sought the seat.

About the Riding

The two halves of Laurentides—Labelle have little in common economically. Mont-Tremblant is one of eastern North America's larger ski resorts, and the hotels, golf courses, restaurants and construction trades that grew up around it have drawn steady population growth, second-home buyers and retirees out of Montreal. Saint-Sauveur, Val-David and Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts run smaller versions of the same model, mixing tourism with arts, crafts and local commerce. Threading through all of it is the P'tit Train du Nord, the 200-kilometre rail corridor between Saint-Jérôme and Mont-Laurier that the Quebec government bought in 1994 and converted into a linear park; by 2006 it was being ranked among the best cycling routes in the country, and it is the one attraction that links the resort south to the working north.

North of the resorts the Antoine-Labelle RCM is a landscape of forest, dairy farms and trucking, with Mont-Laurier, a town of roughly 13,000, as its service centre. The Quebec forest-products crisis that had been closing sawmills across the province since 2006 pressed hard on this half of the riding, and softwood lumber, mill capacity and support for displaced workers were live subjects in the 2008 campaign in a way they simply were not around Tremblant. Much of the ground in between is Crown land: the Papineau-Labelle wildlife reserve on the western flank and the southern reaches of Rouge-Matawin to the northeast are outfitting, hunting and canoeing country, and the villages at their edges live off the seasons.

Distance is the riding's other constant. Getting from Mont-Laurier to a specialist appointment, extending broadband to villages of a few hundred people, and maintaining a highway network across hundreds of kilometres of the Laurentian plateau all cost money that small municipalities do not have, which is why federal infrastructure transfers and rural service programmes feature so heavily in local politics. The seat had gone Bloc Québécois at both of its previous contests, and Deschamps had built a personal profile in both halves of the district over two terms.