I don’t know why Poilievre lost his seat, but I would imagine that embracing the Truckers’ Convoy a few years ago probably did nothing to endear him to the people of Ottawa.
As someone very near that riding, and living just west of centretown in 2022—the last election was pre-Convoy, and its turnout was not huge, and Poilievre was still generally “a guy in a blue suit”. But times have changed:
- Buying coffee for people who wanted to overthrow the legally elected government, even if they didn’t all know that was what they wanted to do, was a Bad Look, yes.
- PP has made himself much more visible on a national / intnl level the last few years, including getting endorsements from Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, et al. It’s much harder to see him as a faceless Conservative and not the face of the Conservatives (especially seeing the number of full colour photos of himself they shoved in the party platform doc lmao)
- Lots of federal workers live in the carleton riding, and object to the proposed CA!doge.
- There’s been a fair amount of development there lately too, meaning demographics have shifted a bit from true-blue rural
- He only started appearing to pay attention to his own riding in the last couple of weeks, as stories that it was in jeopardy started to emerge. My general impression from people who live there is that he’s been, locally, a fairly useless MP. (He held a rally in “Nepean” riding recently, I believe, that turned out to be in his own Carleton and he didn’t even know, bc he’s never there).
- TRUMP. Poilievre made it clear he won’t defend Canada and explicitly said the aggression is “our fault. We’re stupid.” Had he pushed back on tariffs pr annexation rhetoric a la either carney or ford, he’d likely not only have kept his seat but be PM. But he threw in with the leopard and it ate his face
All that combined with his general offputting mien and some shrewd comms by the Liberal candidate (eg when many of Fanjoy’s signs were stolen—how inexplicable!—Fanjoy said “we’re getting more, in the meantime please fly the canadian flag to show your support for our country”), very hard to avoid the impression that he’s put the convoy folks and mapleMAGA ahead of all his other constituents.
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