Mount Royal

Mount Royal is a federal electoral district on the Island of Montreal encompassing the City of Côte-Saint-Luc, the Towns of Mount Royal and Hampstead, the neighbourhood of Snowdon, and the western portion of Côte-des-Neiges. The riding is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse in Quebec, with significant anglophone, francophone, and allophone populations. It is home to one of Canada’s largest Jewish communities—estimated at roughly 21% of the riding’s population—and has been a Liberal stronghold continuously since 1940.

Candidates

Anthony Housefather (Liberal) — A lawyer by training with two law degrees from McGill University and an MBA from Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, Housefather served as a municipal councillor in Hampstead beginning in 1994 and later led the demerger movement that restored Côte-Saint-Luc, Hampstead, and Montreal West as independent municipalities following a 2004 referendum. He served as Mayor of Côte-Saint-Luc from 2005 to 2015, winning re-election by acclamation twice. First elected to Parliament in 2015, he chaired the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights from 2015 to 2019.

Frank Cavallaro (Conservative) — A well-known Montreal broadcast personality, Cavallaro was a longtime CTV weather presenter and later worked on CBC Radio. He entered the 2021 race as the Conservative standard-bearer in a riding where the party has historically struggled.

Ibrahim Bruno El-Khoury (NDP)

Yegor Komarov (Bloc Québécois)

Clement Badra (Green)

Zachary Lozoff (People’s Party)

About the Riding

Mount Royal occupies a central swath of Montreal’s residential heartland, bounded by the slopes of the mountain to the north and the commercial corridors of Côte-des-Neiges and Décarie Boulevard. The Town of Mount Royal—a planned garden suburb dating to 1912—features tree-lined streets radiating from a central plaza, while Westward, Côte-Saint-Luc and Hampstead are compact, largely anglophone municipalities with strong civic identities forged in part by the municipal merger and demerger battles of the early 2000s.

The riding’s Jewish community—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrachi—sustains a dense network of synagogues, day schools, community centres, and cultural institutions, making Mount Royal one of the most significant centres of Jewish life in Canada. This demographic reality shapes local political culture, with issues such as Canada’s relationship with Israel, antisemitism, and religious accommodation frequently surfacing in electoral discourse.

Highly educated and relatively affluent, the riding’s residents work disproportionately in professional services, health care, education, and finance. The neighbourhood of Snowdon, straddling the Côte-des-Neiges and Mount Royal boundaries, adds an immigrant dimension with communities from North Africa, the Philippines, and South Asia. The riding’s linguistic complexity—English, French, Arabic, Yiddish, and Spanish are all widely spoken—reflects Montreal’s character as a multilingual metropolis.