Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Laurier—Sainte-Marie

Few Canadian ridings pack more people into less ground. The district runs from the eastern side of the Plateau Mont-Royal down through Côte-Saint-Louis, across the eastern end of downtown Montreal, and into the old working-class streets of Centre-Sud and Sainte-Marie before reaching the St. Lawrence. Roughly 100,000 people live in it, most of them renters, most of them francophone, in a mix of triplexes, converted lofts and public housing.

Candidates

Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Québécois) — The son of the actor Jean Duceppe, he studied political science at the Université de Montréal, worked as a hospital orderly at the Royal Victoria, and spent the 1980s with the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, joining as an organiser in 1981 and becoming a negotiator in 1986. He won this seat in a by-election on 13 August 1990 and took his place as an independent, because the Bloc Québécois had not yet been registered as a party, and he had been returned at every general election since. He took over the leadership in 1997, and 2008 was his fifth general election at the head of the party.

Sébastien Caron (Liberal) — A litigator with Heenan Blaikie handling civil and commercial cases, Caron had served as an executive director of Lawyers Without Borders.

François Grégoire (NDP) — Grégoire had carried the New Democratic banner in this riding in 2006 and returned to it in 2008.

Dylan Perceval-Maxwell (Green Party) — A Montreal activist and businessman, Perceval-Maxwell had contested this seat for the Greens at every general election since 1997, making 2008 his fifth. He was one of the promoters of BIOBUS, a one-year, $1.3-million trial in 2002 that ran Société de transport de Montréal buses on biodiesel to see whether the fuel would hold up through a Montreal winter. His 2006 campaign was the subject of a National Film Board documentary.

Charles K. Langford (Conservative) — Langford taught finance at the Université du Québec à Montréal, ran a private wealth management practice and had written several books on portfolio management.

The neorhino.ca party, the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Communist Party also fielded candidates, along with one independent.

About the Riding

The riding's economy is knowledge work, culture and services. The Université du Québec à Montréal's main pavilions stand at its downtown end around Berri-UQAM, the Maison de Radio-Canada tower rises over Centre-Sud, and the surrounding blocks hold a heavy concentration of designers, musicians, technicians, translators and small production houses. That made federal culture policy an unusually direct local issue in 2008: in August, weeks before the writs, the government confirmed it was winding up the PromArt and Trade Routes export programmes as part of roughly $45 million in cuts to arts and culture spending, and the reaction from Quebec's cultural sector became one of the defining threads of the campaign there.

The social geography is sharply divided. The Plateau's streets of row houses, cafés and independent shops have drawn a young, educated population for decades and continue to gentrify. Sainte-Marie and Centre-Sud, closer to the river, are among the poorest districts in Montreal, with high rates of single-person households, low incomes and heavy reliance on community organisations — which is why social housing, homelessness and the fate of vacant industrial land were standing municipal-federal files. Along Sainte-Catherine Street East, the Village supports a nightlife, restaurant and retail economy that draws visitors from well beyond the city.

The seat is also where the Bloc Québécois began: Duceppe's by-election win in 1990 came before the party was formally constituted, and no one else has represented the riding since.