Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine

This seat joined pieces of Montreal that had little in common beyond the island they shared: the part of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce west of Hingston Avenue, the small independent town of Montreal West, the borough of Lachine on Lake Saint-Louis, and the cities of Dorval and L'Île-Dorval. It covered 47 square kilometres and 104,715 residents at the 2006 census.

Candidates

Marlene Jennings (Liberal) — Jennings came to politics from the police complaints system, serving as Quebec's deputy commissioner of police ethics from 1990 to 1997. Born in Longueuil in 1951 and a lawyer by training, she won the riding at the 1997 general election when Warren Allmand left federal politics after three decades. She was parliamentary secretary to the solicitor general, then to the minister for international cooperation, and later to Prime Minister Paul Martin with responsibility for Canada–United States relations, a post that brought her into the Privy Council. By 2008 she was a deputy House leader, had served as justice critic, and had backed Stéphane Dion for the leadership. She was seeking a fifth term.

Carmine Pontillo (Conservative) — A lawyer living in Pointe-Claire, Pontillo had worked before his call to the bar as a train conductor on the Dorion–Montreal commuter line, which runs through Montreal West, Lachine and Dorval.

Eric Taillefer (Bloc Québécois) — A secondary school teacher studying law at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Taillefer stood for a party that had been the riding's usual runner-up.

Peter Deslauriers (NDP) — A teacher at Dawson College with degrees in economics and political science from McGill and a master's in art history from Concordia, Deslauriers campaigned for a party slowly building its vote in the island's English-speaking neighbourhoods.

Jessica Gal (Green Party) — A Montreal musician and a founding member of the current Green Party of Quebec, Gal had run provincially in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in 2003 and was making her second federal attempt here.

Rachel Hoffman ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Notre-Dame-de-Grâce sits on a plateau running southwest from Westmount, laid out early in the twentieth century and filled in with duplexes, triplexes and apartment blocks on a grid of tree-lined streets. Monkland Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West carried its commercial life, and Concordia University's Loyola campus stood at its western edge. It mixed long-established English-speaking families with francophone households and successive waves of newcomers, and its large tenant population kept housing costs a recurring argument. Montreal West, a few blocks of Victorian and interwar housing around its train station, kept its own council and its own anglophone institutions.

Lachine's history was industrial. The canal that opened there in 1825 to bypass the rapids drew factories to its banks and made the area one of the first manufacturing districts in the country. Most of those plants had gone by 2008, and the reopening of the canal to pleasure craft in 2002 had turned the corridor into parkland, cycling paths and condominium redevelopment. Notre-Dame Street remained the borough's main street, and the Lake Saint-Louis waterfront its principal recreational asset.

Dorval was the riding's economic heavyweight. Montréal—Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport lay inside its boundaries, midway through a multi-year rebuilding programme by Aéroports de Montréal, and Bombardier's assembly plant beside the runways completed Challenger business jets. Airport-related work — airlines, freight, maintenance, hotels — reached across the western half of the riding, and aircraft noise and airport expansion were standing local files.

Federal questions here ran through official languages and access to services in English, immigration and settlement, and transport policy. By the autumn of 2008 the exposure of aerospace and airline employment to a sharp global downturn had moved to the front of that list.