Repentigny, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Repentigny

No Quebec riding came into the 2008 election with a more unsettled recent history. Benoît Sauvageau, first elected to the Commons in 1993 and the Bloc Québécois member for this district since it was first contested in 1997, was killed in a highway collision on 28 August 2006. A by-election on 27 November 2006 sent Raymond Gravel to Ottawa in his place. Then on 3 September 2008, days before the writ was issued, Gravel announced he would not seek re-election: a Catholic priest attached to the parish of Saint-Joachim in La Plaine, he had been pressed by the Vatican to choose between the priesthood and his seat after opposing Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, and supporting Henry Morgentaler's appointment to the Order of Canada. He chose the priesthood, and the seat came open.

Candidates

Nicolas Dufour (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal on 1 June 1987, Dufour had turned 21 in the summer before the campaign and would be the youngest person in the House of Commons were he to win. The Bloc chose him to succeed Gravel in a district it had held from the beginning.

Réjean Bellemare (NDP) — Bellemare ran from Le Gardeur.

Robert Semegen (Liberal) — Semegen ran from Mascouche.

Bruno Royer (Conservative) — Royer ran from Repentigny.

Paul W. Fournier (Green Party) — Fournier, like Semegen, ran from Mascouche.

About the Riding

The riding covers the regional county municipality of L'Assomption, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence in the Lanaudière region just past the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal. The city of Repentigny, which absorbed neighbouring Le Gardeur in a 2002 merger, held roughly 76,000 of the district's 110,000 residents and sits on the tongue of land where the Rivière L'Assomption meets the St. Lawrence. L'Assomption counted about 16,700 at the 2006 census; Charlemagne, the smallest of the cities and best known as Céline Dion's home town, had fewer than 6,000; L'Épiphanie and the river-road village of Saint-Sulpice make up the rest. Nineteen residents in twenty speak French as a first language.

Most working residents commute. Autoroutes 40 and 640 carry traffic toward the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel and the Le Gardeur bridge, and congestion on both routes was a standing local complaint. Retail and services along the main commercial strips serve the surrounding countryside.

The riding's most consequential employer is at Le Gardeur: the ammunition plant and corporate seat of the business formerly known as SNC TEC, bought from SNC-Lavalin by General Dynamics in a transaction worth about $275 million that closed in January 2007. Its Quebec operations — load-and-assemble work at Le Gardeur, cartridge cases at Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures and propellant at Valleyfield — employed on the order of 1,450 people, which made federal defence procurement a matter of direct local payroll. L'Assomption is home to the Collège de l'Assomption, a classical college founded in 1832 and among the oldest secondary institutions in the province.

The local federal agenda in 2008 ran to manufacturing — a high Canadian dollar and a slowing American market were squeezing exporters across Lanaudière — along with commuter infrastructure, defence contracting, and the arts-funding cuts that were driving the campaign conversation across francophone Quebec.