Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Rivière-des-Mille-Îles

Four municipalities on the north bank of the Rivière des Mille Îles made up this riding: Saint-Eustache, Deux-Montagnes and Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac in the Deux-Montagnes regional county municipality, together with Boisbriand in Thérèse-De Blainville. The seat faced Laval across the water, about 30 kilometres northwest of downtown Montreal. It was open in 2008: Gilles-A. Perron, who had sat for the Bloc Québécois since 1997, first for Saint-Eustache—Sainte-Thérèse, was not seeking another term.

Candidates

Luc Desnoyers (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Saint-Jérôme in October 1950, Desnoyers came out of the labour movement rather than party politics. He hired on at the Kenworth truck plant in Sainte-Thérèse in 1971, served as a shop delegate, led local 1146 of the Canadian Auto Workers and later became vice-president of local 728, and in April 1995 was elected the union's Quebec director. In that job he led the effort to keep General Motors in Boisbriand, arguing that a labour campaign which had already reopened Kenworth could save an auto plant too.

Claude Carignan (Conservative) — Mayor of Saint-Eustache since November 2000 and the best-known local name on the ballot. Born at Champlain in December 1964 and called to the Quebec bar in 1988, he practised civil litigation, labour relations and health and social services law, taught the administration of labour law at the Université de Montréal, UQAM and the École nationale d'administration publique, and co-wrote an annotated edition of Quebec's collective agreement decrees statute. Going into the campaign he was second vice-president of the Union des municipalités du Québec, deputy warden of the Deux-Montagnes RCM and vice-president of the Conseil intermunicipal de transport des Laurentides.

Denis Joannette (Liberal) — A Deux-Montagnes resident, he carried the Liberal nomination.

Normand Beaudet (NDP) — Founder of the Centre de ressources sur la non-violence in Montreal, he stood for the New Democrats.

Marie Martine Bédard (Green Party) — Also from Deux-Montagnes, she ran on the Green ticket.

About the Riding

Saint-Eustache, with 42,062 residents at the 2006 census, is the commercial anchor of the Deux-Montagnes area and its oldest community. Its parish church still carries the scars of 14 December 1837, when British troops overran the Patriote force barricaded inside and burned much of the village.

Boisbriand, population 26,420, spent the decade absorbing the loss of the General Motors assembly plant that opened in October 1965 and shut on 29 August 2002. It was the only plant GM ever built in Quebec and the last car assembly line running in the province — the Hyundai factory at Bromont had already come and gone between 1989 and 1993. By 2008 the site was being rebuilt as the Faubourg Boisbriand, a mixed retail and residential district whose first stores opened in 2007 and which was still under construction during the campaign.

Deux-Montagnes, with 17,402 residents, stands apart in an overwhelmingly French-speaking region: roughly one resident in six gives English as a mother tongue, a legacy of the lakeshore communities that grew up along the railway. The town is the outer terminus of the Deux-Montagnes commuter line, the busiest of Montreal's commuter rail routes. Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac was filling in subdivisions between the water and Autoroute 640 at a pace few municipalities in the Laurentides matched.

The local economy runs on retail, light manufacturing, warehousing along the Highway 15 and 640 corridors, and daily commuting into Laval and Montreal. Voters here had watched the region's industrial base contract through the decade, and the turmoil in credit markets that September and October arrived in the middle of a campaign in which manufacturing employment was already the dominant economic worry.