Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Saint-Laurent—Cartierville

This riding wrapped around the northwest shoulder of the Island of Montreal, joining Saint-Laurent borough to the Cartierville sector next door in Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Its southern half was an almost unbroken band of industrial parks, hangars and office campuses strung along Autoroute 40 and Côte-Vertu Boulevard; its northern half ran through apartment blocks and bungalows to the Rivière des Prairies. Montréal-Trudeau airport lay just past the southwestern boundary, in the neighbouring seat.

Candidates

Stéphane Dion (Liberal) — Dion had held the seat since a by-election in March 1996 and went into this campaign as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, a position he won at the December 2006 leadership convention. Born in Quebec City in 1955, he studied political science at Université Laval, took his doctorate at Sciences Po in Paris, and spent a dozen years teaching political science at Université de Montréal. Jean Chrétien recruited him to cabinet after the 1995 referendum; as intergovernmental affairs minister he referred the question of unilateral secession to the Supreme Court and then drafted the Clarity Act. He held the environment portfolio under Paul Martin and chaired the United Nations climate conference in Montreal in 2005. His 2008 platform was built on the Green Shift, a proposal to tax carbon emissions and return the revenue through income tax reductions.

Dennis Galiatsatos (Conservative) — A Saint-Laurent lawyer, Galiatsatos carried the Conservative banner in the riding.

Jacques Lachaîne (Bloc Québécois) — Lachaîne, a Montreal resident, ran for the Bloc Québécois.

Jerome Rodrigues (NDP) — A retail sales consultant from Dorval, Rodrigues stood for the New Democrats.

Fernand Deschamps ran for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

About the Riding

Saint-Laurent borough had 84,833 residents at the 2006 census and carried one of the heaviest concentrations of industry anywhere in Quebec. Aerospace was the anchor. CAE had been on Chemin de la Côte-de-Liesse since 1953, Bombardier ran aircraft operations inherited from Canadair, and Air Canada's head office stood on Côte-Vertu near the airport. Technoparc Saint-Laurent, begun in 1987 between Autoroute 40 and Autoroute 13 and billed as Canada's first science park, had drawn more than a hundred firms in aeronautics, life sciences and pharmaceuticals. Between the airport, the rail yards and Autoroute 40, jobs in the borough far outnumbered the people living in it.

Aviation history ran deep on the Cartierville side as well. Cartierville Airport opened in 1911 and became a wartime production centre, with Noorduyn Aviation and Canadian Vickers building aircraft there and Canadair inheriting the site afterwards. The airfield was decommissioned in 1988, and in August 1993 Bombardier launched the Bois-Franc project on the land — a planned residential district of townhouses and mid-rise blocks that was still filling in through the 2000s.

Roughly half the borough's residents had been born outside Canada. Arabic- and Chinese-speaking households were the largest of the recent arrivals, alongside long-settled Greek, Italian and Haitian populations, and a large share of residents worked in both French and English. Settlement services, credential recognition and family reunification were live constituency issues.

The riding had been Liberal since it was drawn in 1988, with Shirley Maheu holding it until Dion's arrival. In the autumn of 2008 the questions that mattered locally were the exposure of the aerospace supply chain to the credit freeze then spreading through global markets, the future of federal aerospace and research support, and immigration processing backlogs affecting a constituency where a large share of households had a file open with Ottawa.