Papineau, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Papineau

Papineau was the smallest federal riding in the country: 8.9 square kilometres of north-central Montreal holding 101,019 people at the 2006 census. It covered Villeray, Parc-Extension and the southern half of Saint-Michel, all inside a single borough, and it had changed hands at the previous general election, which made it one of the few genuinely uncertain contests on the island.

Candidates

Justin Trudeau (Liberal) — Trudeau had been working the riding since the spring of 2007, when he won a contested nomination on 29 April against Montreal city councillor Mary Deros and community newspaper publisher Basilio Giordano, choosing a marginal seat over a safe one. A teacher by training, with an English degree from McGill and an education degree from the University of British Columbia, he taught French, mathematics and drama at two Vancouver schools between 1999 and 2002 before returning east. He chaired the national youth service programme Katimavik from 2002 to 2006, then headed a Liberal task force on renewing the party's youth wing, and he was the eldest son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Vivian Barbot (Bloc Québécois) — Born at Saint-Marc, Haiti, in 1941, Barbot taught French at the Cégep de Victoriaville from 1983 to 2001 and then spent two years at the head of the Fédération des femmes du Québec. She unseated Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Pettigrew here in January 2006 and was defending her first full term.

Costa Zafiropoulos (NDP) — A quality assurance analyst, Zafiropoulos ran for the New Democrats, whose vote in the riding had been climbing slowly from a low base.

Mustaque Sarker (Conservative) — A businessman involved in federal politics since the mid-1980s, Sarker was contesting Papineau for the third consecutive election.

Ingrid Hein (Green Party) — A writer and web project manager who had worked as a journalist at the Montreal weekly Hour, Hein ran for the Greens.

Mahmood Raza Baig, a journalist, also stood as an independent.

About the Riding

No Quebec riding depended more on immigration for its shape. About four residents in ten were born outside Canada. French was the mother tongue of roughly 46 per cent and English of about 5 per cent; the remaining 44 per cent reported something else — Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Creole, Punjabi, Portuguese, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu among the largest groups.

Parc-Extension held the extremes. Squeezed into about 1.6 square kilometres between the railway tracks, the Metropolitan expressway and the Town of Mount Royal, it was among the most crowded and lowest-income neighbourhoods in Canada, with South Asian and Greek commercial life along Jean-Talon and Jarry streets. Villeray, east of the tracks, was an older francophone working-class district of duplexes and parish churches, gradually diversifying. The southern Saint-Michel sector carried substantial Haitian, North African and Latin American populations and some of the lowest household incomes in Montreal. Parc Jarry, the riding's largest open space and site of the city's international tennis stadium, sat between Villeray and Parc-Extension.

Work in the riding was mostly small business, retail, restaurants and personal services, together with commuting to jobs elsewhere in the metropolitan area. The federal files that mattered were the ones residents dealt with in person: processing times and rules for family reunification and sponsorship, refugee determination, recognition of foreign credentials, settlement funding, affordable housing in a district of aging rental stock, and income support for households living close to the line.

The contest pitted a sitting Bloc member defending a seat taken from a Liberal cabinet minister against a challenger who had been knocking on doors in the neighbourhood for a year and a half.