In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:
Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.
The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party — or combination thereof! — has achieved since the days of Mulroney.
Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.
I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.
The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so — and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.
First off, that ballot is inexcusable. There needs to be a large change to the definition of a candidate at Elections Canada. Federal elections should be for Federal Parties, first and foremost. The expectation of local representation has long left the station, each MP is a parrot for the leader, and whipped into line by the Whip (of course). Since this is a fact, the first thing is that every Federal Party should be required to run candidates in every riding across the nation. Perhaps we give them a 10% cushion to continue to allow the NDP and Green party to elect not to run members where it will help the Liberal Party, which will help to appease people with that change. This change will harm the Bloc-heads, who have no shame in collecting a Canadian pay cheque while simultaneously demanding separation. Regional rump parties may be fine for Italian parliaments, but they need to be banned in Canada.
Second, they cannot allow the funding by special interest groups creating the abomination that was the ballot in the Carlton riding. Fine, they want to make a point that they don’t like the current system, protest and stuff, but putting 90 people on the ballot, at a cost of $1000 a head, shows enough funding was involved to create an investigation into election tampering. I wonder if they actually found 100 different people per candidate or just recruited 100 people in the riding, for a price, to sign the required paperwork allowing someone to run as a candidate. I’m pretty sure you can’t buy signatures. Not to mention, did any of those “candidates” get 100 votes, each? Really shows the backing of the signers of the petition for them to run, eh?
Comment by Dwayne — May 1, 2025 @ 15:33
Agreed that the ballot stunt was ridiculous, but they got what they wanted … the evil Conservative lost.
Here are the preliminary vote totals from the riding (HTML errors are mine):
Carleton
Total number of valid votes: 86,371
Comment by Nicholas — May 1, 2025 @ 16:26