Terrebonne—Blainville, QC — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Terrebonne—Blainville

Some of the fastest-growing ground in Quebec lay here, on the far bank of the Rivière des Mille Îles from Laval. The riding paired the Terrebonne sector of the city of Terrebonne, in Lanaudière, with the Laurentides municipalities of Blainville and Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines; the Lachenaie and La Plaine sectors of the same city sat in the neighbouring seat of Montcalm. A little over 200 square kilometres was divided between new subdivisions, older village cores and remaining farmland. Residents were overwhelmingly francophone and, on average, younger and more heavily mortgaged than the provincial norm.

Candidates

Diane Bourgeois (Bloc Québécois) — Born in Montreal in November 1949, Bourgeois spent her working life as a schoolteacher before entering federal politics. She won Terrebonne—Blainville for the Bloc Québécois in 2000 and held it in 2004 and 2006. Her critic assignments for the Bloc ran from women's issues, parental leave and housing to international cooperation and Canada's foreign aid programme.

Eva Nassif (Liberal) — Nassif, a Laval resident, ran as the Liberal candidate.

Daniel Lebel (Conservative) — Lebel, also of Laval, carried the Conservative banner.

Michel Le Clair (NDP) — Le Clair, of Terrebonne, stood for the New Democrats.

Martin Drapeau (Green Party) — Drapeau, of Boisbriand, ran for the Green Party.

M. Zamboni Cadieux ran as an independent.

About the Riding

Terrebonne had been assembled in August 2001 out of three older municipalities — Terrebonne itself, Lachenaie, founded in 1683, and La Plaine, settled in 1830 — and the merged city more than doubled in population between the 2001 and 2006 censuses, reaching 94,703. Only the original Terrebonne fell inside this riding, and with it the city's historic core at Île-des-Moulins: a seigneurial complex of sawmill, bakery, flour mills and estate office raised between the 1720s and 1850 and classified as a historic site by Quebec in 1973. The Moulin-Neuf dam beside it, rebuilt in 1979, carries a footbridge over the river.

Blainville, 35 kilometres northwest of downtown Montreal at the foot of the Laurentians, had grown along the same trajectory to about 46,500 residents. It maintained its own municipal police force, ran a two-pad arena and an aquatic centre for a young population, and hosted Les Brasseurs du Nord, the brewery behind the Boréale line of beers. Its industrial park drew light manufacturing and distribution, but most working residents left the city each morning.

Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines kept a farming character and also carried a significant federal presence. The Correctional Service of Canada ran a complex there taking in the Regional Reception Centre, opened in 1973 as the intake and assessment point for federal prisoners in Quebec, the Special Handling Unit that has operated on the site since 1984 as the highest-security custody in the country, and a regional mental health centre, with Archambault Institution alongside. Corrections was among the larger employers in the municipality.

Commuting shaped nearly everything else. Autoroutes 640 and 15 and the Blainville—Saint-Jérôme commuter rail line carried tens of thousands of residents daily toward Laval and the island, and congestion, transit expansion and the price of gasoline were perennial complaints. The housing that drew families north of the river came with debt, and the tightening of credit markets through September and October 2008 landed on a population that had bought recently and stretched to do it.

The riding had returned Bloc Québécois members since its creation in 1997, first Paul Mercier and then Bourgeois, who by 2008 had eight years of constituency work behind her. Federal issues with local traction included transport infrastructure, crime and sentencing policy, and support for young families.