There were plenty of parties that lost out big in the recent federal election.
The NDP is first and foremost, down from 25 seats won in the 2021 election to just seven last month. The Bloc Quebecois dropped from 32 seats won last time to 23 this time. The Greens had three seats last time, and dropped to a mere one.
But what about the People's Party of Canada?
They elected exactly zero MPs in both 2021 and 2025. Party leader and former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier 鈥� he left in a snit after losing a leadership race 鈥� can't even win his riding. The PPC has never elected an MP, ever. So how could they have mattered at all to the outcome on April 28?
A lot more than you'd think.
In 2021, the PPC were on a lot of people's minds.
In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the second year of lockdowns, outbreaks, new variants, and vaccines finally becoming widely available to all Canadians, the PPC harnessed a particular kind of grievance 鈥� politics.
They became the party of the vaccine denialist, of the Alex Jones fans, of the conspiracy-minded hard right.
And they went up in the polls. Not enough to threaten the big parties, but they polled over five per cent for quite a while. In the 2021 election, they got 4.9 per cent, more than 840,000 votes. That's more than double the total of the Green Party.
How did they do this time?
Elections Canada's preliminary results showed they got 0.7 per cent 鈥� 141,212 votes.
What happened to the other 700,000 former PPC voters? A few stayed home. But a good number of them likely voted for the Conservatives.
Pierre Poilievre became the new Conservative leader in 2022. The previous leader, Erin O'Toole, had run for the party leadership as a true-blue Conservative, and then immediately tacked to the political centre in a bid to win the federal election.
With that tactic having failed, the Tories chose Poilievre, a Parliamentary attack dog and life-long activist and politician who has no interest in the centre at all.
Poilievre may be a pure right winger, in Canadian terms, but he's also extremely politically adept. One thing he did was to display his anti-woke, anti-elitist bona fides in ways that endeared him to the average PPC voter, but without scaring (too much) the more moderate Tories and potential swing voters.
The Conservatives definitely won over some previous Liberal and NDP voters as they increased their share of the popular vote from 34.3 per cent to 42 per cent. But Poilievre's promises to defund the CBC, his opposition to vaccine mandates, and his general take-no-prisoners style helped him absorb votes from the more eccentric right, too.
The question now is, can the Tories hold onto those votes? Will Poilievre stay on and manage to find the balance between being seen as a sensible leader in waiting, and an angry attack dog eager to take down the woke establishment?
We'll see. It's a tricky balancing act for any leader, much less one who just lost an election.
