Who will write the history of Pierre Poilievre’s loss?

“We have to learn the lessons of tonight.”

Of all the things I heard Pierre Poilievre say on the campaign trail, that line echoes loudest. He’s made it clear now he intends to stay on as leader, so the lessons he and his party settle on won’t just determine Poilievre’s political fate. With eight million voters and a fanatically devoted base behind him, the lessons he takes from this election will shape the future of political discourse in this country.

Poilievre has already shaped its recent past. His gift for messaging is so strong he managed to destroy his two greatest targets — Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax — from the Opposition bench before an election was even called. Perhaps, one of the few lessons all sides can agree on, then, is that Poilievre became a victim of his own success; he killed his adversaries too soon.

Lessons flow from stories. A big story at the heart of this election was Poilievre’s transformation of his party into a vehicle for the global far-right. That was the opening gambit of his leadership campaign, which sprang out of his support for the Freedom Convoy. Merging his party to the convoy earned Poilievre the full-throated support of the Republican media machine — voices far outside the Canadian mainstream, like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones and countless more, all started cheering for him. So did Elon Musk, who labelled CBC accounts on X as “government-funded” at Poilievre’s request. Atop them all was Donald Trump, who praised Poilievre until the day Trudeau resigned. 

“Are you looking forward to working with Pierre Poilievre, the new guy?” the right-wing podcaster Hugh Hewitt asked Trump on Jan. 6. 

“I am, I am,” Trump replied. “If that’s what happens. Certainly, it would be very good, our views would be more aligned, certainly.” 

By the time the writ dropped in March 2025, the Conservative Party of Canada was a completely different outfit than it had been in 2021. 

This became blindingly obvious at the 10 Poilievre rallies I attended in April. The vast majority of Poilievre’s fans were not farmers or buttoned-down social conservatives. They didn’t wear suits or overalls. They wore hoodies and ball caps, sported neck tattoos and vape pens. They were, as so many proudly told me, supporters and members of the Freedom Convoy. 

There were exceptions, for sure. In Brampton, Ontario, the crowd was mostly South Asian and well put-together. They wore pea coats and blazers; instead of vaccines, they spoke to me of rising crime and housing costs, and Liberal indifference to the struggles of immigrants whose votes that party took for granted. In Trenton, Nova Scotia, I met a distinguished-looking entrepreneur and lifelong Conservative voter of about 70. When I asked how he felt about Trump, he expressed revulsion and didn’t quite believe me when I told him most of the people I’d spoken to at these rallies admire the American president. He seemed totally oblivious to what his party had become.

That Trenton rally had many relics of the past. Peter McKay and his dad Elmer, both former Conservative cabinet ministers, were in the room to introduce Poilievre. They conveyed tradition and decorum; Poilievre softened his tone in their presence, and so did his audience. But that rally was an exception. Far more emblematic was the one two days later in Nanaimo, where a massive crowd of 30-something platinum blondes and goateed men in trucker hats careened from a solemn rendition of “O, Canada” to angry-mob chants of “jail not bail!” I heard multiple calls to hang Carney and Trudeau throughout that rally, shouted by men whose girlfriends would playfully swat them and say, “stop it.”

By the time the campaign ended, I’d come to think of the federal Conservatives not as a political party, but as the Canadian branch of a global movement. That movement drapes itself in the language of traditional conservatism — fiscal responsibility, rule of law — but is something else at heart: a ruthless, anti-democratic force that exploits the genuine difficulties people all over the world are experiencing in the face of rapid change and converging crises. The movement relies on misinformation spread through social media. Fact-checked journalism is the enemy. Nostalgia for a golden past is constantly evoked. Violence hovers at the margins. Power for its own sake is the goal. 

This movement is winning elections all over the world. In Italy, they’re represented by Giorgia Meloni, in Hungary by Victor Orban, in Argentina by Javier Milei. They occupied Brazil for a while in the form of Jair Bolsonaro. Their purest embodiment is Donald Trump, a man so transparent he serves as a window into the far-right’s true, lawless nature.  

Many of those leaders lost one or more elections before they finally took office. Is that a lesson we should take from April 28? 

Eventually, perhaps. For now, the story of Canada’s election is a tale of the far-right’s failure to establish yet another outpost on the world stage. The ripple effects of that failure are now spreading in two directions: outward across the global village, and inward through Canada’s body politic.

In global terms, Canada’s a middle power with a lapsed reputation for punching above our weight. But on April 28, we landed a hit for the ages: we laid down the first electoral bulwark against the far-right’s international advance since Trump’s victory in November. Canadians voted for international cooperation on everything from climate change to global trade, diplomacy, foreign aid, freedom of the press and regulation of the internet. Carney’s international experience and connections were a major theme in this election; Poilievre cast them as proof that the Liberal leader doesn’t care about Canadians. But a plurality of Canadians reached a different conclusion. To them, the international connections that Carney embodies are a great defence against the frenemy next door. 

One Canadian election, admittedly, won’t reshape the course of world history. But it is, at the very least, a nudge in the right direction. A sign that resistance isn’t futile, no matter how steep the odds. That’s an important signal. 

And what about within Canada?

Now we’ll see what Carney can deliver. Will his international rolodex bear fruit? Can he talk Trump down from his 51st state rhetoric? Will he break down the interprovincial barriers to trade that have heightened our dependence on America? Can he win over that uncountable swath of Canadians who didn’t vote for him so much as against Poilievre?

Those are all critical questions. But no less critical is what lessons the Conservatives draw from this election, and whether they decide to alter their course. But after a month in which I spent many collective hours standing a few metres away from Pierre Poilievre, ingesting his stories and listening to thousands of Canadians chant his slogans, here’s what I’m bringing home.

Ever since Poilievre became leader of the Conservative party, he accelerated Canada’s move toward a political system that rewards dishonesty. That’s far more dangerous than any policy proposal. Dishonesty erodes trust, the glue that binds our social compact; it also obscures reality, darkening the common empirical world view that’s a prerequisite for rational public discourse.

Poilievre and his Conservative Party don’t have a monopoly on deceit. Carney has plenty to answer for with respect to things like offshore tax havens, or what he’ll do about those assets. But there’s simply no comparison between Carney’s handful of evasions and Poilievre’s mountain of deception. To assert an equivalency here would itself be one more lie. 

It’s simply a fact that Poilievre has taken misinformation to new heights, achieving levels never before seen in Canada. The examples are countless, big and small: His conflation of the carbon tax with record inflation; his claim that the party that built Trans Mountain and LNG Canada is blocking pipelines; his assertion that Meta’s decision to stop posting Canadian news outlets is an example of government censorship; his ritual invocation that 40 violent criminals in Vancouver were arrested 6,000 times in one year; his daily prayer for Canadians to own “a beautiful house on a safe street” without ever mentioning the oppression the Freedom Convoy inflicted on 12,000 residents of Ottawa’s Centretown. 

That kind of talk earned Poilievre a 20-point lead in the polls. With that kind of incentive structure, why stop lying? Why let real journalists ask you pesky questions? More than that, why wouldn’t your opponents start playing the same game? Sooner or later, the whole system will tilt toward dishonesty.

One lesson from election night, then — the one that I took home — is that lying still has consequences. Whether the motivation of Canadians’ collective vote, the result was a blow to misinformation. Reality-based politics and messaging were rewarded.  

Whether the Conservative Party of Canada reaches the same conclusion is an entirely different question. During the campaign, Poilievre liked to insult the Liberals by saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. He might feel differently now. 

Perhaps, the final lesson should come from the guy who won the election. From the outset, Carney had a line he uses to describe his approach to Trump’s tariffs; it now applies to his Opposition party’s big decision.

“Prepare for the worst.”