The Conservative leader was once assumed to be the next prime minister. How did he lose his own riding?
When Pierre Poilievre took the stage at the Conservative party headquarters in the early hours after the federal election, his future was far from clear.
The Conservative leader delivered a relatively upbeat concession speech, congratulating newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney who had led the Liberal party to a minority. He listed the Conservative party’s many gains in an election that was closer than some had predicted and gave the party a record 41.3 per cent of the popular vote.
“We have much to celebrate tonight,” he told cheering supporters, vowing to continue to fight on as party leader.
The Evening Citizen
Poilievre thanked volunteers, the Conservative team, members of caucus, staff and others. But there was no mention of Carleton, the Ottawa-area riding Poilievre had represented for more than 20 years.
That might not be surprising. As he spoke, early votes were just being counted in Carleton, but the trend was not going Poilievre’s way. The Conservative party leader continued to trail his Liberal opponent, Bruce Fanjoy, as each new vote tally was reported. It is unlikely the Conservative team was completely surprised by what they were seeing. They had sent extra resources into the riding in the final weeks of the campaign amid reports that Poilievre’s seat was at risk.
In Fanjoy’s Manotick home, meanwhile, close supporters and family members watched election coverage with bated breath as the Carleton votes slowly trickled in. When the first poll was reported decisively in Fanjoy’s favour – with 265 polls yet to come – he briefly teared up. “It was a big moment for me. It told me that what we had done had landed,” Fanjoy later told an interviewer.
It would be hours before the final outcome in Carleton was known. Fanjoy went to bed and was woken a few hours later with a congratulatory phone call from his team telling him he had done what he vowed to do — defeat Poilievre to win the riding. Fanjoy won the riding by more than 4,500 votes.
He did not hear from Poilievre until a week after the election when the two had a polite conversation, according to Liberal staffers. It would also be a week before Poilievre thanked the people of Carleton “who gave me two decades as an MP” as he headed to his first post-election meeting with his caucus.
By then, Poilievre had his eyes, quite literally, on other horizons, meeting residents in the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot where newly elected MP Damien Kurek had agreed to step aside so that a byelection could be held.
Poilievre has emerged from the roller coaster federal election with the strong support of his caucus (although they retain the power to review his leadership) and 25 more seats. But Carleton was not one of them, and that is a significant loss for a party leader.
Fanjoy was the right candidate at the right time, but Poilievre had been losing Carleton for a while.
It did not happen overnight – or even over the course of an election campaign.
The largely rural riding had a huge shift in demographics as suburban neighbourhoods grew and more people moved out of central Ottawa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Local voters were increasingly uneasy about the direction of some of the Conservative party’s positions and Poilievre’s often angry approach to politics. Not to mention there was a growing sense among voters that the riding was being taken for granted by Poilievre.
But the one issue that gets frequently mentioned by Carleton residents was Poilievre’s support of members of the convoy protest that occupied downtown Ottawa in early 2022.
Mix all that with a Liberal candidate who wore through multiple pairs of shoes while knocking on tens of thousands of doors in his more than two-year quest to defeat Poilievre, and Conservatives had all the ingredients for a disaster in Carleton. Fanjoy, who is known as optimistic, good-natured and a good listener, offered a positive approach that many in the riding have said they were looking for, especially given the threats coming from the U.S.
Paul Robillard, the chair of the Carleton Federal Liberal Association, calls the flip of the longtime Conservative riding an evolution.
As far back as 2015, Robillard and others became convinced Poilievre could be beaten when Liberal candidate Chris Rogers came within 1,700 votes of him during a federal Liberal sweep to power. Rogers “worked his buns off”, said Robillard, and the team built a solid base and learned lessons it could use to build on those numbers. It would be a decade before the conditions were right for that to happen.
When Fanjoy expressed interest in running, he began to build on what Robillard and others saw was possible, in no small part, by being who he was – a hard worker, a good listener, a naturally warm person with a gift for connecting with people.
Fanjoy said he faced headwinds at first as the Liberal government’s popularity plummeted and the Conservatives seemed certain to lead the next government, but that began to change after Justin Trudeau stepped down to be replaced by former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney and, crucially, U.S. President Donald Trump began talking about Canada becoming the 51st state.
But Poilievre’s personality also gave the Liberals an edge, according to Fanjoy. The Conservative leader was a polarizing figure in the riding with a fierce base of support, but there were growing numbers of people who were uncomfortable with his style – especially women, both nationally and at the riding level. Critics complained about the “Trumpiness” of some of his language – the use of woke, for example.
Marjory LeBreton, a former adviser to Stephen Harper and former Conservative Senator, lives in the Carleton riding and gave an early warning about some of those concerns. In June of 2022, she publicly expressed worries about the direction of the Conservative party, noting the embrace by some of its members of the convoy blockade. She resigned from Carleton’s Conservative board.
Carleton resident Mélanie Chrétien, a high school teacher, is a longtime Liberal voter who says she would have voted Conservative if the party had a different leader. She was looking for a conservative approach to financial stability and was not happy with the approach of the Trudeau Liberals.
Carney’s leadership, she said, came as a relief and made it easy for her to vote Liberal.
As for Poilievre, Chrétien said his performative approach to politics, along with his divisiveness and “contempt for others”, is not what she wants to see in a leader.
“They should change leadership.”
Poilievre still has a strong base of support, in Carleton and across the country. The day after the election, one woman in Carleton was in tears when asked about Poilievre losing his seat. Another woman just shook her head when asked for an interview. “I am in mourning,” she said.
But that base has eroded.
Mark Towhey, a broadcaster and former chief of staff to Toronto mayor Rob Ford, agreed that Poilievre’s attack dog persona and likeability issues were factors in him losing his seat. Poilievre took steps to change his tone, which won him kudos during debates, but that likely came too late, said Towhey.
Meanwhile, Towhey said the Conservatives’ plans to reduce the size of the federal public service likely lost him votes in the riding, even if Poilievre was careful to say it would be done through attrition.
Sixteen per cent of the riding is made up of government employees. “All of whom might have heard: ‘there goes my job,’” Towhey says.
That message, he said, is a hard sell in a government town.
“He is one of those politicians that you love him or hate him. He is a very good pitbull… but he probably would not have been somebody I would have voted for as leader,” Towhey added. A key for Poilievre, he said, will be successfully making the transition from attack dog to leader.
“If Pierre can learn to adapt – he has adapted a lot since he became leader – if he can keep doing that, he should stay as the leader.”
Towhey says Poilievre has a future as a leader, and maybe even as prime minister one day.
Just not likely as the MP for Carleton.
Bruce Fanjoy turned out to be the right person at the right time to run against Poilievre, says Lori Turnbull, a political scientist at Dalhousie University.
“I give Fanjoy a lot of credit.”
But Poilievre also lost the riding, in part because, as leader, he was no longer making micro-decisions about the campaign in Carleton, she says. Significantly, Poilievre’s decision to show public support for the convoy cost him votes in Carleton.
“The convoy definitely cost him a lot. He should have stayed the hell away from it,” Turnbull says.
She noted that Poilievre was torn between building alliances with political movements that would likely be inclined to vote Conservative across the country and defending the interests of his constituents, many of whom were public servants.
As for election night, Turnbull said she thinks Poilievre probably knew he was going to lose his riding, which might have influenced his choice to speak fairly early before final results were in.
In a column in Policy magazine, Turnbull wrote that Poilievre losing Carleton is a problem the Conservative party didn’t need, “but it also creates an opportunity, if he wants it, for Poilievre to press ‘reset’ on some aspects of his approach.” Those include communications and relationship building.
Poilievre and members of the Conservative party have talked about learning from the successes and failures of the election results. Time will tell how that plays out.
For now, Liberal supporters are still savouring a victory that was bigger than even they anticipated.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think any of us saw the 4,000 vote spread,” said Paul Robillard of the Carleton Federal Riding Association. “We thought it could be close.”
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