No Drama. No Surprise. Pierre Poilievre Is Back

No drama. No surprise. Pierre Poilievre won without breaking into a sweat. So what else is new?

After last night, or maybe today, the good voters of Battle River-Crowfoot will probably never see the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada again, except on television. That may or may not be a blessing, but few will mind either way.

You could describe last night’s result in the byelection campaign to elect Poilievre in the sprawling electoral district northeast of Calgary and southeast of Edmonton as anticlimactic, except that no one in their right mind should ever have thought there would be much of a climax.

This was a done deal the instant Battle River-Crowfoot MP Damien Kurek politely stepped aside to make way for Poilievre four days after the 2025 Canadian general election in which Kurek had been resoundingly re-elected at the same moment his boss was being humiliated by Liberal Bruce Fanjoy in his Ottawa-area Carleton riding.

Well, that’s what happens when you represent voters who live near Ottawa and you take coffee and doughnuts to the insurrectionists occupying the capital city.

And yesterday’s result is what happens when you re-play the same campaign in the safest and most uncritically Conservative riding in Canada — or maybe the second safest, I forget — a place where actual dinosaurs once roamed and their counterparts in the political dimension still do.

Despite the best efforts of a surprising number of well-known political commentators to spin this yarn into a horserace between Poilievre and local independent candidate Bonnie Critchley, it wasn’t and was never going to be.

That may explain why most Alberta commentators were so bored by the whole affair. Their colleagues from other provinces might have marvelled about what a great insurgent campaign Critchley was running, but the locals for the most part knew better. This may have amounted to journalistic malpractice in a few cases, but for the most part it was the triumph of imagination over intelligence, and as the clock ticked down to last night, of hope over experience, as the great 19th-century wit Oscar Wilde said of first and second marriages.

Critchley’s slogan, "This is our home, our riding," implying quite correctly that Poilievre was a carpetbagger of sorts — could have been a winner… in Edmonton or Toronto or even in Calgary. But out there along the Battle River — they call ’em the Badlands for a reason — it was doomed to go pfffffft.

Last night it did. Moments before midnight, Elections Canada showed Critchley with 4,252 votes or 9.9 per cent, to Poilievre’s 34,280 or 80 per cent. Liberal Darcy Spady had managed to break into four figures with 1,876 votes, or 4.4 per cent. The NDP’s Katherine Swampy has 905 votes at that hour, or 2.1 per cent. I’m not going to bother listing the other 210 candidates. Final numbers will be available from Elections Canada today.

As for those optimistic souls who thought that if only Poilievre could score a few percentage points below the 82 per cent Kurek accumulated on April 28 the knives would be out for him among in his perpetually disaffected base, that was never going to happen. In the event, he was close enough for government work, as they say.

Even the presence of 214 names on the ballot — most of them, like Poilievre himself, from away — failed to add much drama to the affair. Most of them were from the so-called Longest Ballot Committee, and their goal was to protest against Canada’s single-member plurality electoral system, better known as first past the post.

I’m sure their presence, requiring the use of non-standard write-in ballots, only set their cause back a few years.

Uninspiring as the campaign was doomed to be, lots of people in political life will be delighted.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberals, who were good sports and made it easy for Poilievre to get back into his subsidized Ottawa public housing at Stornoway as quickly as possible, obviously see him as so disagreeable that he is bound to be a disaster for the Conservative Party.

Conservatives will for the most part be delighted too, if only because they won’t have to organize another leadership campaign just yet and, in the case of the MAGA radicals who are Poilievre’s most ardent supporters, because they can count on him to continue to pursue the extremist agenda that the Liberals believe will put off most Canadians.

The Alberta separatists who infest Conservative circles in Alberta will be pleased as well, hopeful that now Poilievre is MP for a riding where they have lots of influence, they can push him to support their ambitions for Alberta sovereignty association, outright separatism and 51st statism.

Canadians being Canadians, this does not necessarily bode well for Poilievre either.