Laval—Les Îles, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Laval—Les Îles

Laval's far western end formed this seat, where Île Jésus tapers to a point and breaks up into the cluster of small islands called Îles-Laval. It took in the waterfront enclave of Laval-sur-le-Lac, the subdivisions of Laval-Ouest, the mixed residential and industrial sectors of Sainte-Dorothée, and reached east into Fabreville and the western half of Chomedey, closed in by the Rivière des Mille Îles on one side and the Rivière des Prairies on the other.

Candidates

Raymonde Folco (Liberal) — Folco, born in 1940, had sat for this part of Laval since 1997, first for Laval-Ouest and then for Laval—Les Îles once the riding was drawn in 2003. Her working life before Parliament ran through education and immigration policy: she was a vice-president of Quebec's Conseil des communautés culturelles et de l'immigration in 1988 and its president from 1990 to 1995. She was seeking a fifth term.

Mohamedali Jetha (Bloc Québécois) — A machinist from Laval, Jetha carried the Bloc banner in a riding the party had not won since it was created.

Agop Evereklian (Conservative) — Evereklian was born in Beirut, came to Canada at sixteen and settled in Sainte-Dorothée in 1987. He spent 23 years in the Liberal Party, four election campaigns of it as the party's chief organizer in this riding, and chaired the federal Liberal regional association for Laval before leaving for the Conservatives roughly eighteen months before the writ. He campaigned on being available to constituents, on more police and stiffer criminal penalties, and on building commercial and cultural links between Laval and cities abroad.

Zahia El-Masri (New Democratic Party) — Running here for the first time, El-Masri put pay equity, faster recognition of foreign medical credentials, more daycare places for Laval's young families and environmental measures at the centre of her campaign, and argued that voters had lost confidence in the sitting member and her party.

Brent Neil (Green Party) — Neil was the Green candidate.

Sylvain A. Trottier stood for neorhino.ca, a party Elections Canada had registered in August 2007.

About the Riding

Laval counted 368,709 residents at the 2006 census, third among Quebec cities, and this riding held some of the island's sharpest contrasts. Laval-sur-le-Lac is a small and wealthy pocket on the water; Laval-Ouest and Fabreville are ordinary middle-income subdivisions filled in through the postwar decades; Sainte-Dorothée mixes housing with commerce and light industry along the Autoroute 13 and Autoroute 440 corridors.

About a third of residents were born outside Canada. Chomedey, the most populous sector of Laval, is home to large Greek, Lebanese, Syrian and Armenian communities, and Arabic, Greek and Armenian were among the most widely spoken languages after French and English. Immigration casework — sponsorships, family reunification, visa files — was routine constituency business here in a way it was not in most Quebec seats.

Employment was mostly somewhere else. Retail strips, construction and small manufacturers supplied the work inside the boundaries, while most residents crossed the Rivière des Prairies bridges to Montreal or drove east to Laval's own employment districts, among them the life sciences cluster the city had been building since 2001 around the Armand-Frappier institute. Congestion on the bridges to the island was a standing grievance.