Laval, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Laval

This riding takes in the middle band of Île Jésus: the Laval-des-Rapides sector, the eastern half of Chomedey and the western part of Pont-Viau, all former towns folded into the new city of Laval in 1965. The Rivière des Prairies separates it from the Island of Montreal on the south. It is suburban territory of boulevards, shopping centres and postwar subdivisions, wrapped around the two highways that carry commuters into Montreal.

Candidates

Nicole Demers (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal in 1950, Demers worked as a health services administrator and had owned a restaurant before entering federal politics. She won Laval for the Bloc Québécois when the newly drawn seat was first contested in 2004, defeating the Liberal Pierre Lafleur, and held it in 2006. She was the party's critic for families and caregivers in her first term and moved to the seniors file after that, seeking a third term on a record built around social policy.

Alia Haddad (Liberal) — A teacher who had spent five years as a school commissioner, Haddad had already contested Laval for the Liberals in 2006, when the party was still carrying the weight of the sponsorship affair in Quebec, and 2008 was her second attempt at the seat.

Jean-Pierre Bélisle (Conservative) — Born in Montreal in 1948, Bélisle studied economics and law at McGill, was called to the Quebec bar in 1973 and practised in Laval from that year. He was best known locally as the provincial member for Mille-Îles, winning the seat for the Liberals in 1985 and again in 1989 and serving as parliamentary assistant to the finance minister and then as deputy House leader before resigning in March 1994 after a falling-out with his party's leadership. He later specialised in environmental law and, from 1996, ran a vineyard and orchard at Saint-Joseph-du-Lac.

Alain Giguère (NDP) — Born in Lachine in 1958, Giguère is a tax lawyer. He had run for the New Democrats in Laval in 2004 and in Laval—Les Îles in 2006 before returning to this riding.

Eric Madelein (Green Party) and a Marxist-Leninist candidate completed the field.

About the Riding

Laval as a whole is Quebec's third-largest city, with roughly 370,000 residents at the 2006 census, and this riding holds its densest and most diverse sectors. Chomedey is the largest of them, a mix of apartment blocks and single-family streets with substantial immigrant communities and commercial life conducted in several languages. Laval-des-Rapides and Pont-Viau, closest to the bridges into Montreal, are older residential areas laid out along Boulevard des Laurentides and Boulevard de la Concorde.

The single largest change to daily life here in the years before the vote was the extension of the Montreal metro's orange line across the river. Three stations opened on 28 April 2007 at the end of a 5.2-kilometre extension, the first time the subway had left the Island of Montreal; two of them — De la Concorde and the northern terminus at Montmorency, beside Collège Montmorency — are inside the riding, with Cartier just past its eastern edge. The new service reshaped commuting patterns and property values across the area.

Retail and services carry much of the local economy, with Carrefour Laval and Centre Laval on Boulevard Le Corbusier drawing shoppers from across the north shore and the city's industrial parks supplying manufacturing and distribution work. Laval had also spent the decade positioning itself as a centre for pharmaceuticals and health technology. Fast growth brought the usual pressures — road capacity, school and health facilities, services for both ageing homeowners and newly arrived families — and federal infrastructure money was a recurring ask. The seat had gone Bloc Québécois at both contests since its creation in 2004, but the Liberals remained competitive across Île Jésus.