Joliette

The riding of Joliette is situated in the Lanaudière region northeast of Montreal, straddling the transition between the Saint Lawrence Lowlands and the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. The city of Joliette—population approximately 21,000—serves as the regional centre, set along the L'Assomption River. The broader Joliette regional county municipality had a population of roughly 71,000 in 2021. The Lanaudière region extends northward from the Saint Lawrence shoreline through increasingly rugged terrain, rising from 20 metres near the river to nearly 800 metres at the higher elevations. The riding also encompasses the Atikamekw community of Manawan, located 87 kilometres north of Saint-Michel-des-Saints on the shores of Lake Kempt, with a population of more than 2,400. French is the mother tongue of over 92 percent of residents in the city of Joliette.

Candidates

Gabriel Ste-Marie (Bloc Québécois) — An economist and academic, Ste-Marie taught economics at the Cégep régional de Lanaudière and was a researcher at the Contemporary Economics Research Institute and lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal. First elected in 2015, he served as Bloc Québécois House Leader from 2017 to 2018, briefly sat as an independent in early 2018 during a dispute with then-leader Martine Ouellet, and rejoined the Bloc caucus in September 2018. He served as the party's critic for finance and the treasury board.

Michel Bourgeois (Liberal) — A businessman who owned a company in Sainte-Marcelline-de-Kildare and had resided in Joliette for more than 35 years, Bourgeois was running as the Liberal candidate for the third time. The party cited his deep knowledge of the riding and experience from previous campaigns.

Roger Materne (Conservative) — Materne ran as the Conservative candidate in Joliette in the 2021 election.

Alexis Beaudet (NDP) — Beaudet carried the NDP banner in the riding.

Érica Poirier (Green) — Poirier represented the Green Party in Joliette for the 2021 contest.

About the Riding

Joliette has been a federal electoral district—in various configurations—since Confederation. In its modern form, the riding has been one of the Bloc Québécois's most reliable strongholds in the Lanaudière region. The Bloc held the seat through most of the 1990s and 2000s before losing it during the 2011 Orange Wave, only to reclaim it with Ste-Marie in 2015.

The region's economy blends light manufacturing, agriculture, and a growing service sector. The Festival de Lanaudière, founded in 1978, is one of North America's leading classical music festivals, drawing audiences to outdoor concerts and performances in historic churches across the region. The presence of the Atikamekw community of Manawan adds an important Indigenous dimension to the riding—the community hosts an annual pow-wow and maintains traditional practices including canoe-building, snowshoe-crafting, and birch bark basket weaving.

Local issues in the 2021 campaign included support for the agricultural sector, rural broadband expansion, health-care access in smaller communities, and the economic relationship between the Lanaudière region and the Montreal metropolitan area. The sovereignty question—while less dominant than in earlier decades—continued to animate the riding's political culture, particularly through the lens of protecting Quebec's cultural and linguistic identity.