Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre — once heavily favored in the polls to become the next prime minister — not only lost to Liberal Mark Carney in Monday’s election, but he appears to have lost the parliamentary seat he has held for 21 years at press time.
Poilievre’s spectacular crash and burn ended late on Monday night, when he lost the seat from Carleton he held since 2005 to Liberal challenger Bruce Fanjoy. Poilievre became the youngest member of Parliament when he won the seat at age 25.
There was a certain symmetry to Poilievre’s rise and fall, since the brief saga of Conservative ascendancy began with another shocking election upset: the June 2024 victory of Conservative Don Stewart in Toronto-St. Paul’s. Stewart unexpectedly won a seat held by the Liberals for three decades, causing panic in the Liberal ranks and starting a doomsday clock countdown for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Poilievre was elected leader of the Conservative Party by a landslide vote in 2022. He campaigned as a populist who supported the “Freedom Convoy” against coronavirus lockdown tyranny, while criticizing Trudeau in the strongest terms. Poilievre was once temporarily ejected from Parliament for calling Trudeau a “wacko.”
Running hard against Trudeau was a very successful strategy for Poilievre — until suddenly it was not, as Trudeau announced his resignation in January. Trudeau was gone by March, replaced as both Liberal Party leader and interim prime minister by globalist banker Mark Carney. Poilievre’s 20-point lead in the polls evaporated almost overnight.
Carney often heckled Poilievre for running against a prime minister who was no longer there and the Conservative Party leader never came up with a good answer to those taunts. Many observers also claim anger among Canadian voters at U.S. President Donald Trump was a major factor in the outcome of the race as well, even though Trump endorsed Carney and called Poilievre “stupidly no friend of mine.”
The loss of Trudeau as an opponent, Trump’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada, and the end of some Liberal programs that Conservatives had run hard against were a triple threat that Poilievre proved incapable of dealing with. Every political analyst in Canada and the United States has different advice for how Poilievre could have handled Trump, but he somehow managed to chart a course that inspired no one.
Fanjoy’s campaign, which picked up huge amounts of funding and manpower as the Conservative’s star faded, was based on portraying Poilievre as the Trump of the North. The Liberal also seems to have done well with the large numbers of government employees who live in the district, convincing them that Poilievre intended to make Trump-style cuts to government programs.
Another wind blowing through the perfect storm of Poilievre’s undoing was the collapse of the New Democratic Party (NDP), the Liberals’ rival to the left. When the Conservatives were 20 points up in the polls, the NDP looked like it might displace the Liberals as the leading left-wing party in Canada. Votes on the Left were about as split as they could possibly get, which clearly helped the Conservatives.
The NDP flamed out hard after Trump launched his tariff war. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was nobody’s answer to the question of who was best poised to fight back against Trump. Canadians wanted their economy whipped into fighting shape for the tariff battle, so NDP’s vision of a flabby welfare state became unpopular.
The left-wing vote consolidated behind the Liberals with remarkable speed once the embarrassing Trudeau was gone, and Singh essentially gave up running for prime minister, instead seeking to scrounge out a place for his party as big social spenders in a coalition government.
Singh, like Poilievre, lost his parliamentary seat on Monday. Unlike Poilievre, he quickly announced his resignation as NDP leader, and the entire party might follow him into oblivion, as it may come up short of the 12 seats needed to retain official party status.
Poilievre did not immediately resign after losing his seat. In his concession speech, he boasted of all that Conservatives have accomplished under his leadership:
To my fellow Conservatives, we have much to celebrate tonight. We’ve gained well over 20 seats. We got the highest share of vote our party has received since 1988. We denied the NDP and Liberals enough seats to form a coalition government.
…
We gave voices to countless people across this country who have been left out and left behind for far too long. We won the big debates of our time, on the carbon tax, on inflation, on housing, on the drug crisis, on crime. Conservatives have been leading the debate and we will continue to put forward the best arguments to improve the lives of our people right across this country, but we will not stop there. Every single day our Conservative caucus and I will be holding the government to account on behalf of the millions of Canadians who believed in the message of change.
Poilievre on Tuesday seemed determined to remain as Conservative Party leader. His fate may be determined by whether Conservative voters blame him for blowing such a commanding lead, or turn their ire against Trump and fellow Canadians who voted to keep the Liberals in power.
