Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Louis-Saint-Laurent

Quebec City's northwestern fringe formed this riding, reaching from the Neufchâtel end of the Les Rivières borough out through Loretteville and Val-Bélair toward the Laurentian foothills. Two places inside its boundaries were not part of Quebec City at all: L'Ancienne-Lorette, which reconstituted itself as a separate city on 1 January 2006 after voting to leave the merged capital, and Wendake, the Huron-Wendat community enclosed by Loretteville.

Candidates

Josée Verner (Conservative) — Verner spent close to two decades in communications and public administration, including work at Quebec's health and social services ministry and a stint as a political staffer in the Bourassa government, before running federally. She lost this riding to Bloc Québécois candidate Bernard Cleary in 2004 and won it comfortably in 2006, entering cabinet the same day as Minister of International Cooperation and minister for La Francophonie and Official Languages. In August 2007 she moved to Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, and on 26 May 2008, after Maxime Bernier resigned from Foreign Affairs, she took the Francophonie file back. She was among the most prominent ministers on the Quebec ballot.

France Gagné (Bloc Québécois) — A technician from Quebec City, Gagné carried the Bloc banner in a riding the party had won in 2004 and lost badly two years later.

Hélène H. Leone (Liberal) — A doctoral student, Leone ran for the Liberals, who had been squeezed into third place or lower across the Quebec City region.

Alexandrine Latendresse (New Democratic Party) — Born in 1984, Latendresse had recently come back to Quebec and was working on an undergraduate degree at Université Laval, where she had studied Russian, when she accepted the NDP's invitation to run. It was her first campaign.

Jean Cloutier (Green Party) — Cloutier stood for the Greens.

About the Riding

With roughly 96,000 residents and French the mother tongue of about 95 percent of them, Louis-Saint-Laurent was among the more homogeneous and more suburban seats in the province. Its housing ran from the dense postwar grid of Neufchâtel, close to the city core, out to the wide lots and wooded edges of Val-Bélair, still filling in with new subdivisions through the decade.

Wendake gave the riding a dimension no other Quebec City seat had. The Huron-Wendat Nation's community sits entirely surrounded by the La Haute-Saint-Charles borough, and in March 2008 it opened a hotel and museum complex built for the capital's anniversary year. Federal Indigenous policy — land claims, self-government, program funding — was constituency business here rather than an abstraction.

Public administration, retail and services provided most of the employment, along with construction and the local industrial parks, and many residents worked downtown or in government offices elsewhere in the capital region. Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, immediately north of the riding, is one of the country's largest military installations and a significant source of local jobs; the 5th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group based there had furnished the Canadian battle group in Kandahar from the summer of 2007 into early 2008, which gave the Afghanistan debate an immediacy here that it lacked in much of Quebec.

The other issue trailing Verner through the campaign was cultural. As Heritage Minister she carried responsibility for the decision to scrap a set of arts and cultural export programs shortly before the writ, a decision that angered Quebec's cultural sector and became one of the Bloc's central arguments. She campaigned on replacing them and on the government's record in a region the Conservatives had all but swept in 2006.