In the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously and portentously wrote “there are no second acts in American lives.”
Nowhere is this less true than in politics, American or otherwise.
Indeed, when I met Donald Trump in 1997, he was a has-been who patiently waited alone in the bowels of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to be interviewed by a city reporter for a fluffy human-interest story.
Politics is the preserve of second acts and second chances.
Doug Ford lost the 2014 Toronto mayoralty race to John Tory; now he is the three-term premier of Ontario.
Tory, a one-time Progressive Conservative leader, could well be Toronto’s mayor again next year should he topple Olivia Chow, who finished third in that 2014 contest.
Chow herself was considered a spent political force until Tory’s 2023 resignation after the Star’s city hall bureau revealed his inappropriate relationship with an aide. Her victory in the mayoral byelection that year came after nine years away from elected office.
All of which is to say that Pierre Poilievre is in good company at the second chance saloon.
The Conservative leader garnered an impressive 80.4 per cent of the vote in Monday’s Battle River—Crowfoot byelection. (Our tireless Star colleagues, Raisa Patel in Ottawa and Alex Boyd in Calgary, stayed up late so the rest of us didn’t have to.)
Poilievre’s need to hit the comeback trail in Alberta was necessitated by his humiliating loss April 28 in Kanata—Carleton where Liberal Bruce Fanjoy wrested away the Ottawa-area riding.
Days before the federal election, the Star was the first to disclose the Tory chief was in deep trouble in a region he had represented since 2004 when he was 25 years old.
That devastating story, informed by internal polling helpfully shared by Ford’s provincial Tories, rattled Poilievre’s team so much they scrambled to organize an election eve rally in the riding.
It was, of course, too little too late.
So now what?
As the Star’s deputy Ottawa bureau chief Alex Ballingall pointed out this week, the end of Poilievre’s parliamentary exile sets the stage for his next fight, a leadership review vote at a January party convention in Calgary.
While no one is openly challenging him, there are many Conservatives smarting from the fact he squandered a massive lead in public-opinion polls and lost to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals four months ago.
To wit, on Jan. 1, the Star’s polling aggregator, the Signal, had the Tories at 46.9 per cent support, the New Democrats at 18.7 per cent, the Liberals at 18.6 per cent, the Bloc Québécois at 9.7 per cent and the Greens at 2.7 per cent.
That was a 28.3 percentage point advantage — by comparison, in Super Bowl LI, the Atlanta Falcons only blew a 25-point third-quarter lead to lose to the New England Patriots in one of the worst collapses in the history of sport.
Poilievre’s apologists counter that he steered the Tories to their highest share of the popular vote since Brian Mulroney in 1988, winning 41.3 per cent of the ballots cast.
Unfortunately for that close-but-no-cigar argument, Carney’s Liberals took 43.7 per cent of the vote, the party’s best showing since Pierre Trudeau in 1980.
Still, Poilievre is nothing if not tenacious. He displayed self-awareness early Tuesday morning when he thanked his new constituents for embracing a carpetbagger.
“They reinforced a lot of lessons that all of us in politics have to learn and relearn and relearn again: humility and hard work, loyalty and love,” he told supporters.
While the latest polls suggest Carney is enjoying a honeymoon with Canadian voters — despite failing to tame Trump — Poilievre, as he embarks upon his do-over, might find solace in something Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack Up.
“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Here are some other political stories by Star colleagues I enjoyed this week:
Martin Regg Cohn on Mississauga being the happiest place in Canada
Raisa Patel on Mark Carney’s long-awaited conversation with Donald Trump
Rob Ferguson on the province’s $1.6 billion in new funding for municipalities
Mark Ramzy on federal Green Leader Elizabeth May finally stepping down (speaking of second acts).
Mark McQueen on Doug Ford’s political prowess
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