Sun sets on Pierre Poilievre’s campaign
2025-04-29T06:05:38Z
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, see…
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.
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