Mount Royal, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Mount Royal

Mount Royal packed 98,888 residents into 22.7 square kilometres on the western slope of the mountain: the city of Côte-Saint-Luc, the towns of Hampstead and Mount Royal, the Snowdon district, and the western half of Côte-des-Neiges. The seat had returned Liberals without interruption since 1940, sending Speaker Alan Macnaughton to Ottawa for sixteen years and Pierre Elliott Trudeau for nineteen more.

Candidates

Irwin Cotler (Liberal) — Cotler came to the Commons from McGill, where he had taught law since the early 1970s, directed the human rights programme and built an international practice on behalf of political prisoners. He won the by-election of 15 November 1999 called after Sheila Finestone's appointment to the Senate, served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General from 2003 until the Martin government fell, and was named the Liberal caucus critic for human rights by Stéphane Dion on 18 January 2007. He began the campaign seeking a fifth mandate.

Rafael Tzoubari (Conservative) — Tzoubari served as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces before settling in Montreal in 1976, trained as an engineer and worked in real estate development. A first-time candidate living in Hampstead, he dated his interest in politics to 2006 and to the Harper government's posture during the Lebanon war of that summer.

Nicolas Thibodeau (NDP) — Thibodeau, a resident of the Town of Mount Royal, ran for a party with no historical base in the riding.

Tyrell Alexander (Green Party) — Alexander stood for the Greens.

Maryse Lavallée (Bloc Québécois) — Lavallée carried the Bloc's colours in one of the least sovereigntist constituencies in the province.

Diane Johnston ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party and Antonio Artuso, a translator and interpreter, for the Communist Party.

About the Riding

The riding's halves were very different places. The Town of Mount Royal was laid out early in the twentieth century by the Canadian Northern Railway as a planned garden suburb at the northern end of the tunnel bored under the mountain, and it stayed a low-density enclave of detached houses on curving streets. Côte-Saint-Luc and Hampstead were established residential municipalities with dense institutional life of their own. Together with Snowdon they gave Mount Royal the largest Jewish population of any riding in Quebec — roughly a third of all residents — served by synagogues, day schools, seniors' residences and community organizations clustered along Côte-Saint-Luc Road and Décarie Boulevard.

Côte-des-Neiges, on the other side of the Décarie trench, ranked among the most densely settled and most varied neighbourhoods in Canada, a first-address district for newcomers from dozens of countries. About one resident of the riding in ten was Filipino, and a substantial student population lived within walking distance of the Université de Montréal. Incomes there sat far below those in the western municipalities.

Health care and education anchored employment, with the Jewish General Hospital — among the busiest teaching hospitals in Quebec — the largest single workplace inside the riding and the Côte-des-Neiges hospital and research complex close by.

The Conservatives had been courting this electorate since 2006, largely on foreign policy, and treated Mount Royal as one of their few realistic targets on the island of Montreal. Cotler's own standing on human rights cut against that appeal. Other issues carried locally: immigration and family reunification for Côte-des-Neiges households, federal support for community and health institutions, security funding for community buildings, and the cost pressures facing a population with a high proportion of seniors.