As truck drivers in protest rolled towards downtown Ottawa and began occupying the Canadian capital for four weeks, they were welcomed by a man waving from the highway overpass, his hands covered in knitted red mittens with white maple leaves in the palm of their hands.
The man was Pierre Polyeive. He became a leader of the Conservative Party and was widely known until recently as Canada’s next prime minister. Soon he will have a new title: former member council.
In the midst of surprising upset, voters in Polyevel’s district (or rides as is known in Canada) left him away on Monday. His embrace of the so-called free convoy in 2022 appears to have played a key role in the defeat.
Voters in this part of Canada have memories of the time.
Poilliebre, a resident who suffered a hard time sleeping amid the 24-hour blast of the empty corner, brought coffee and donuts to truck drivers protesting pandemic restrictions and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s liberal government.
On Tuesday, some leaders who were recently criminally convicted had repeated complaints among voters in Carlton in his district.
“Populist politics aren’t for me,” declared voter Rick Paulosky, who said he had supported conservatives in the past.
Truck driver protests were not the only explanation that the Canadians offered for the defeat of their candidates.
Some people said they don’t trust President Trump’s trade war with Canada and his pledge to annex it as the 51st state, given the reverberation of the US president’s language. Poilievle also condemned the “radical awakening ideology,” pledging to reduce government, reduce foreign aid and effectively eliminate public broadcasting.
Others said they were tired of Polyeve’s style of offensive politics. “Canada is broken,” he tells voters — at least until Trump’s threat sparks a wave of Canadian patriotism. Some voters also said that as he rose to power, Poilliebre ignored his local constituency.
Pauloski said it was postponed to a hug against Polyevell’s vaccine. “The fact that he has an anti-vaccine campaign really bothered me because I am a research scientist,” he said.
Even those who ultimately voted for Mr. Polyevel said there was a moment of doubt.
Since his first run in the Canadian Parliament in 2004, lifelong conservative Megan Johnson has voted for him. However, during the siege of the truck driver’s capital, it began to feel like too much.
“After he went to a fleet of truckers, I said: I will never vote for him again,” Johnson recalled as he went out to do yard work on her seven-acre property with a small tractor. “It really carved me.”
Eventually, Johnson was unable to take herself to vote for the Liberal Party and planted a Poliever sign outside her home.
Canadian voters do not vote directly for the Prime Minister. And while the liberals achieved their best in this week’s election, conservatives received the highest price in the popularity vote since 1988, despite Poilierbre’s defeat, and won a seat in the House.
The loss of Mr. Poilierbre came at the hands of a retired businessman and a political beginner running on the liberal line named Bruce Fanjoy.
Fanjoy launched his campaign in 2023. This is an unusually long lead time for anyone running for Canadian parliament. That and the following year, the Liberal Party launched a dramatic plunge in polls, eventually leaving Poilierbre’s conservatives nearly 30% away. Voters denounced Liberal Trudeau, who resigned as prime minister earlier this year, bringing inflation, rising interest rates and rising home prices.
“There were times in the last two years when I was on canvas and I felt like the wind was blowing through my face,” Fansy said. But it became much easier after Trudeau resigned and replaced by Mark Kearney, a former central banker in Canada and England.
In his district, there was little obvious sympathy for Polyelvre on Tuesday.
In the parking lot of a shopping centre in Manotick, one of the larger villages in the constituency, Marilyn Schacht said around the town that Poliever “appeared to be preferred – until it wasn’t.”
She voted for him on Monday, as did her husband Ryan. Both said they believe Poliereble’s style is what Canada needed during the current economic and political crisis.
“People were always comparing him to Trump. The person you want to fight against him should be a guy like Trump,” Schacht said. “You want Churchill to fight Hitler, you don’t want Chamberlain. I think we have Chamberlain now.”
By Tuesday morning, Poiriebre’s campaign office, on the top floor of a building with a church and martial arts school sign in downtown Manotick, had largely been empty. The volunteer said no one could comment before closing the door.
Early on Tuesday morning, during a concession speech, Polyeierle vowed to remain as a conservative leader. The party’s caucus has eliminated two previous leaders following election losses. It is not clear if that applies to the third time.
There has been widespread speculation that conservative members in safe seats at the Alberta party base would resign so that Polyeble could return to the House through special elections.
Outside Manotick’s restored factory, Fanjoy admitted that the constituency was not suddenly joining the rest of Ottawa as a liberal territory.
“I discovered that Carlton has a strong conservative tradition, but that’s not the Pierre Polyevell tradition,” he said.
