Saint Boniface, MB — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Saint Boniface

The southeastern quarter of Winnipeg, east of the Red River, made up this riding: the historic French-speaking district of Saint-Boniface with its cathedral ruins and institutional core, and the larger, mostly English-speaking suburbs of St. Vital, Windsor Park and Southdale beyond it. No other seat in western Canada carried the same weight of francophone history, and the Liberals had held it continuously since 1988.

Candidates

Shelly Glover (Conservative) — Glover joined the Winnipeg Police Service in 1989 and had spent nearly nineteen years with the force, reaching the rank of sergeant. She worked in both official languages. Her campaign centred on the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which she argued left young offenders without meaningful accountability and allowed adult criminals to recruit children with money and drugs knowing the consequences would be minimal.

Raymond Simard (Liberal) — Simard was born at Ste. Anne in 1958, took a Bachelor of Arts at the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and a commerce degree at the University of Manitoba, and worked as a businessman and consultant in family enterprises. He entered the Commons through the by-election of 13 May 2002, called after Ron Duhamel's appointment to the Senate, and was returned in 2004 and 2006. Seeking a fourth mandate, he campaigned on child care, promising a national programme of new spaces with standards, funding for training and better pay for early childhood workers.

Matt Schaubroeck (NDP) — A student, Schaubroeck ran on the federal government's cuts to cultural programmes announced that summer, arguing they had fallen hard on Saint-Boniface and particularly on Franco-Manitoban theatre, and pledged to have the funding restored and increased.

Marc Payette (Green Party) — A programmer analyst, Payette argued for cutting greenhouse gases and pollution and returning the resulting revenue through reductions in income and payroll taxes.

Justin Gregoire, a district manager, carried the Christian Heritage Party banner on questions of life and family.

About the Riding

Saint-Boniface began as a Catholic mission on the east bank of the Red in the 1810s and remained the institutional heart of French-speaking western Canada. The cathedral, the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, the Centre culturel franco-manitobain, the Musée de Saint-Boniface and the Théâtre Cercle Molière — founded in 1925 and the oldest continuously operating theatre company in the country — were all within a few blocks of one another. The Festival du Voyageur filled Whittier Park and Fort Gibraltar each February. Roughly one resident in six spoke French, and a much larger share could work in both languages, a profile found nowhere else west of Ontario.

That concentration of cultural institutions is why the federal arts spending cuts announced in the summer of 2008 registered here as a live local issue rather than an abstraction. It was raised by candidates on the left and answered by the Conservative campaign throughout September.

St. Vital and the southeastern suburbs supplied most of the riding's population and a different set of concerns. Predominantly anglophone, largely owner-occupied and middle income, these neighbourhoods sent residents to work in health care, education, government and the professions across the city. St. Vital Centre was the principal retail employer, and newer subdivisions were still filling in on the riding's southeastern edge. Youth crime and auto theft, both running high in Winnipeg through the middle of the decade, gave the Conservative campaign its opening here.

Politically the seat had gone Progressive Conservative in 1984 and returned to the Liberals in 1988 under Ron Duhamel, who held it until his move to the Senate. In 2008 the Conservatives ran a bilingual serving police officer against Duhamel's successor.