Groulx
Groulx is a provincial electoral district in the Laurentides region of Quebec, Canada, that elects members to the National Assembly of Quebec. It notably includes the city of Boisbriand as well as a few other small cities.
It was created for the 1981 election from a part of the Terrebonne electoral district.
In the change from the 2001 to the 2011 electoral map, it gained a small part of the city of Blainville from the Blainville electoral district; it did not previously include any part of that city.
In the change from the 2011 to 2017 electoral map, the riding will lose the Saint-Rédempteur neighbourhood of Blainville to the riding of Blainville.
From its creation in 1981 until 2007, Groulx was a bellwether riding always sending a member from the governing party to the National Assembly. Since the ADQ breakthrough in the suburbs of Montreal in 2007, the riding has been targeted by all major parties and is part of a collection of ridings that determine Quebec elections. The riding is overwhelmingly francophone and white, and has a strong nationalist undercurrent, making it a battleground riding between the Parti Québécois, ADQ/CAQ, and the Quebec Liberals.
In 2014, the PQ nominated Martine Desjardins, a former leader of the FEUQ during the 2012 student strike, and she was seen as a star candidate. Although the PQ began the campaign with a strong lead among francophones and heavily targeted CAQ-held ridings such as Groulx, the party’s decline and the CAQ’s rise during the final two weeks of the campaign kept the riding in CAQ hands, albeit in a tight three-way race in which no candidate received more than 31% of the vote.