Québec, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Québec

The campaign landed in the middle of Quebec City's 400th-anniversary year, and this riding contained nearly every site where the anniversary was being marked. The district covers the old city core south of the Rivière Saint-Charles — Vieux-Québec inside the walls, Cap-Blanc below the cliff, the colline Parlementaire, and the neighbourhoods of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Montcalm, Saint-Sacrement, Saint-Roch and Saint-Sauveur — along with a strip of Les Rivières north of the river and the small parish municipality of Notre-Dame-des-Anges.

Candidates

Christiane Gagnon (Bloc Québécois) — Gagnon, born at Chicoutimi on 16 April 1948, sold real estate before the 1993 election carried her to Ottawa. She chaired the Bloc's caucus from 1996 to 1998 and handled the party's files on the status of women, housing and poverty. She was seeking a sixth consecutive term in a seat she had never lost.

Myriam Taschereau (Conservative) — A lawyer and member of the Quebec bar, Taschereau took over the Manoir Taschereau at Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce — the heritage house of the family of Quebec premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, from whom she descends — and ran it from 1998 until 2006. She was among the Conservatives' more prominent recruits in the Quebec City region.

Damien Rousseau (Liberal) — Rousseau ran from Lac-Beauport.

Catherine Roy-Goyette (NDP) and Yonnel Bonaventure (Green Party) also stood, both from the city.

About the Riding

About 95,000 people live in a compact stretch of the old capital, and two-thirds of the occupied dwellings in it are rented. The central neighbourhoods are walkable, aging and comparatively low-income; households are smaller and younger than in the suburban ridings that ring the city. More than nine residents in ten report French as their mother tongue.

Work comes from four main sources: the provincial government on the colline Parlementaire, health care and education, tourism, and the technology, design and media firms that filled the rebuilt Saint-Roch quarter around the Jardin de Saint-Roch after two decades of decline. The Port of Quebec, below Cap-Blanc and around the Bassin Louise, handles grain, ore and other bulk cargo alongside a growing cruise trade.

The anniversary programme dominated 2008. All three levels of government paid for it, and Ottawa's total commitment — its share of the organizing society's budget plus a much larger sum for related infrastructure — ran to roughly $110 million. The money built the Espace 400e on the Bassin Louise, rebuilt stretches of waterfront, and covered Robert Lepage's Moulin à images, projected each summer evening onto the grain silos of the Old Port. How Ottawa framed the commemoration became a partisan argument in its own right, with sovereigntists objecting that the federal government was recasting the founding of Quebec as the founding of Canada.

That argument fed directly into the sharpest cultural issue of the campaign in Quebec: the cuts announced in the summer of 2008 to federal arts and cultural export programs, PromArt and Trade Routes among them. They were debated harder in Quebec City than almost anywhere else, and the Bloc pressed the point throughout. Heritage conservation funding for the walled city, the future of the port lands, and housing affordability in the gentrifying lower town rounded out the local federal agenda.