Meet your federal election candidates

With the next federal election less than a month away, most of the major parties' candidates have stepped forward in eastern Ontario and western Quebec.

In Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, incumbent Conservative MP Pierre Lemieux is running against candidates in the three other major federal parties.

Lemieux has held the riding since the 2006 federal election, when he narrowly defeated the Liberal candidate in what had traditionally been one of the longest-held Liberal ridings in eastern Ontario.

The MP served in the Canadian Forces for 20 years and retired at the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, prior to spending several years in the high-tech sector in Ottawa and starting his own company in project management.

The riding's Liberal candidate, Julie Bourgeois, is campaigning in her first federal election since being nominated in September 2009. She has worked as an assistant Crown attorney for Prescott-Russell for the last nine years.

Like her opponent, second-time Green Party candidate Sylvie Lemieux served 21 years in the Canadian army and also retired as Lieutenant-Colonel. Lemieux then worked in a number of public service careers, before joining the private sector as a facility program manager in 2005. She later returned to work at several government departments.

St-Albert resident Denis Séguin was nominated as the federal candidate for the New Democratic Party (NDP) this past weekend. The first-time candidate has been a party member for more than 20 years, and has worked in agricultural cooperatives since 1980.

On the Quebec side, three candidates have presented themselves in the Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabel riding: incumbent MP Mario Laframboise of the Bloc Québécois, first-time candidate Daniel Fox for the Liberal Party, and Stephen Matthews for the Green Party.

Laframboise has held the riding since 2000, winning with a clear majority in three of the last four federal elections. A former notary by profession, the MP had previously served as mayor of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix and the reeve of the Papineau MRC, before entering into federal politics. He recently served as the Bloc Québécois' deputy whip, as well as a former Bloc critic to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Infrastructure.

Fox, the son of former MP and current Liberal Senator Francis Fox, is a 26-year-old certified chartered accountant. He currently divides his time between Montreal and the rural region.