Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Marc-Aurèle-Fortin

North-central Laval made up this riding: Sainte-Rose along the water, Auteuil to its east and the western end of Vimont, with the Rivière des Mille Îles marking the northern boundary between the island city and the mainland municipalities of the Laurentides and Lanaudière.

Candidates

Serge Ménard (Bloc Québécois) — A lawyer who reached Ottawa after a substantial career in Quebec City, Ménard was elected to the National Assembly for the Laval seat of Laval-des-Rapides in a by-election in December 1993. He served as Parti Québécois minister of Public Security from 1994 to 1996, minister of State for the Metropolis from 1996 to 1997, Minister of Justice and Attorney General from 1997 to 1998, Public Security again from 1998 to 2002 and Transport from 2002 to 2003. Elected federally in 2004 and re-elected in 2006, he was the Bloc's spokesman on justice and public safety and spent much of 2008 resisting Conservative proposals to toughen the handling of young offenders, arguing that Quebec's rehabilitation-first approach produced better results.

Robert Frégeau (Liberal) — Frégeau carried the Liberal banner.

Claude Moreau (Conservative) — Moreau ran for the Conservatives, who had made only limited inroads in Laval.

Benoît Beauchamp (New Democratic Party) — Beauchamp stood for the NDP.

Lise Bissonnette (Green Party) — Bissonnette was the Green candidate.

About the Riding

Marc-Aurèle-Fortin was one of the newer ridings on the map, created in the 2003 redistribution out of pieces of Laval-Centre, Terrebonne—Blainville, Laval-Est and Rivière-des-Mille-Îles and first contested in 2004. Its name honours the landscape painter Marc-Aurèle Fortin, born at Sainte-Rose in 1888, whose watercolours of elm-lined Laurentian villages are among the best-known Quebec images of the interwar period. Both federal elections held in the riding to that point had gone to the Bloc Québécois.

Fourteen municipalities were merged to create the city of Laval in 1965, Sainte-Rose among them, and it still reads as a place of its own — an old commercial street and a church square set back from the shoreline parks on the Rivière des Mille Îles. Auteuil, east of it, is housing almost end to end. Vimont filled in later with detached housing aimed at young families moving off the island of Montreal.

The riding held close to 100,000 people and was predominantly francophone, with Haitian, Moroccan and Lebanese families among the larger immigrant communities. Comparatively few residents worked inside the boundaries, and the commute defined the day: south toward the bridges, or onto the Blainville–Saint-Jérôme commuter rail line, which stops at Sainte-Rose, had added a station at Vimont in October 2006 and was extended north to Saint-Jérôme in January 2007. Federal transit money was a recurring local ask.

The campaign here was fought mainly on ground Ménard knew. The Conservatives were running nationally on tougher sentencing and on changes to the youth justice system; Ménard, with two stints as Quebec's public security minister behind him, made the counter-argument the centrepiece of his own campaign, while the Bloc pressed the arts funding cuts that had inflamed Quebec opinion in September. Manufacturing losses around Montreal and the sudden turn in financial markets over the last three weeks supplied the economic backdrop.