Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher

This riding covered the eastern part of the city of Longueuil, essentially the eastern half of the Vieux-Longueuil borough, facing Montreal's east end across the river. The Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine bridge-tunnel links the two shores here. The riding sits inside the Longueuil agglomeration, which took the shape it has now on 1 January 2006, when Boucherville, Brossard, Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville and Saint-Lambert left the merged city.

Candidates

Jean Dorion (Bloc Québécois) — Dorion came to his first federal candidacy at 66 with a long public record behind him. A sociologist born in 1942, he worked as a political attaché to Quebec minister Jacques Couture and then as chief of staff to Gérald Godin while Godin was responsible for applying the Charter of the French Language. He led the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal from 1989 to 1994 and returned to its presidency in 2003; between those terms he was Quebec's delegate general in Tokyo. He speaks six languages, Japanese among them.

Ryan Hillier (Liberal) — Hillier carried the Liberal banner in a riding where the party had finished well back through the Bloc era.

Jacques Bouchard (Conservative) — A Longueuil resident, Bouchard stood for the Conservatives, who were trying to push their 2006 Quebec gains out of the Quebec City region and into the Montreal suburbs.

Lise St-Denis (New Democratic Party) — Born in 1940, St-Denis spent her career as a teacher and holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Quebec literature and in education. She ran for the NDP while the party was still building a Quebec organization riding by riding.

Danielle Moreau (Green Party) — Moreau was the Green candidate.

Serge Patenaude ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

The seat was open. Caroline St-Hilaire, the Bloc Québécois member since 1997, announced in January 2008 that she would not run again, saying that after more than ten years of living out of a suitcase she wanted time with her children. The predecessor Longueuil riding had a place in the Bloc's own history: Nic Leblanc, elected there as a Progressive Conservative in 1984, quit the party in June 1990 over the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord and joined the new Bloc Québécois caucus later that year.

Aerospace shapes the local economy more than anything else does. The aircraft engine maker Pratt & Whitney Canada runs its head office and principal plant from Longueuil, and no other private business on this stretch of the south shore comes close to it for payroll. Just beyond the riding's southern edge, in the Saint-Hubert sector, sit the Canadian Space Agency's John H. Chapman Space Centre, which holds the bulk of the agency's staff, and the Saint-Hubert airport, a general aviation field on a former military base with maintenance and flight training firms clustered around it; a good many of the people who work at both live on this side of the line. Federal procurement, aerospace research funding and the exchange rate against the American dollar were live local questions, and they sharpened as the financial crisis broke during the campaign.

Away from the aerospace corridor the riding mixes older working- and middle-class streets in the heart of Vieux-Longueuil with lower-density postwar development toward its eastern end. It is strongly francophone, with a growing immigrant population in the older sectors and a large share of residents commuting to Montreal by bus or through the bridge-tunnel. Transit money, manufacturing job losses and the Conservative cuts to arts and cultural export programs were the arguments most often heard at the door.