Sun sets on Pierre Poilievre's campaign

A mood of defiant optimism prevailed at the start of the night at Ottawa’s Rogers Centre, where the Conservative Party of Canada hunkered down for election night. 

“We’re expecting a long night,” one staffer told me, sounding positive. And as the first results trickled in from Atlantic Canada to show Conservatives doing better than polls had expected — precisely as the base had been saying all for weeks — the incipient crowd began cheering.

“You can’t trust those polls,” one Conservative fan told me before the sun set outside. “The media just buys them. Who are they calling? Have you ever been called by a pollster?”

I admitted I had not. But that refrain, which I’d heard so many times throughout Poilievre’s April campaign, went quiet by the time the sun was down. The polls had barely closed in British Columbia before CTV and Global News were calling a Liberal victory; the only question was whether Mark Carney would lead a majority or minority government.

That was the end of the cheering at Conservative headquarters. Instead of supporters streaming in, they started trickling out. The dozen YouTubers who’d been livestreaming the proceedings put their cameras away and disappeared. I saw a woman crying. That was before the numbers started trickling in from Carleton, Pierre Poilievre’s own riding. Bruce Fanjoy, the Liberals’ longshot contender, was pulling ahead in the riding Poilievre has represented since 2006. 

Then Jagmeet Singh came on the big screens (did I mention that the party pledging to defund the CBC was watching the results come in on CBC?) to deliver his speech. Singh’s announcement that he’d lost his seat and would be resigning as leader of the NDP brought the last genuine cheer of the night from the 200 or so people left in the building.

By the time Pierre Poilievre came out to deliver his remarks, he faced the smallest crowd he’d addressed since the start of the campaign — perhaps since he became leader of the federal Conservatives. His smile, never the most genuine in Canadian politics, seemed particularly forced as he delivered his shortest address of this election, at just over 11 minutes. 

It was a peculiar kind of loss. As Poilievre pointed out, Conservatives picked up over 20 seats since the last election and with some 42 per cent of the popular vote Poilievre won his party more votes than any Conservative leader since 1988. Does it matter? The Liberals got more.

“We are cognizant of the fact that we didn’t get over the finish line yet,” Poilievre said. “We know that change is needed, but change is hard to come by. It takes time. It takes work. And that’s why we have to learn the lessons of tonight.”

What exactly are those lessons? Poilievre didn’t say. That’s the million-dollar question, the one that will guide the Conservative Party’s next iteration and to some degree the future of Canadian politics. The only certain thing now is that Poilievre won’t be the one to say what those lessons are.

Despite his pledge that “I will never give up on fighting for everyone who stood with us today,” if Poilievre isn’t ready to give up as leader of the Conservative Party, he may not have a choice. He might not even be a Member of Parliament anymore. By the time he wound down, a woman standing just behind me was bawling and blowing her nose.

The TV screens went dark before we learned who won the Carleton riding. We didn’t hear Mark Carney’s speech, either.

UPDATE at 8:50 ET on April 29: Pierre Poilievre has lost his seat in Carleton. The Liberal candidate, Bruce Fanjoy, won by a narrow margin. Poilievre has not yet issued an official statement on the future of his leadership.