Not even close. Pierre Poilievre wins a landslide victory in Battle River-Crowfoot
Independent Bonnie Critchley finishes a distant but respectable second
As was widely expected, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had no problem winning yesterday’s federal by-election in the Conservative stronghold of Battle River—Crowfoot. Poilievre’s commanding lead was clear the moment the first poll was reported shortly after 8:30 p.m., which showed the party leader with 437 votes compared to a combined 49 votes for all the other candidates in the race.
After a long night of counting the write-in ballots, Elections Canada reported that Poilievre was elected with 40,548 votes — 80.4 percent of the total votes cast in the by-election. Poilievre’s landslide win is fell just short of the 82.8 percent earned by former and future MP Damien Kurek just a few months ago, but shows that Conservative Party support remains solid in this sprawling rural Alberta riding.
And despite the expected easy win, this wasn’t a low turnout election. According to Elections Canada, 50,434 of the 85,736 registered voters in the riding showed up to cast a ballot. That’s an 58.82 percent turnout, which is unusually high for a by-election.
Vote results of the top 10 candidates (visit Elections Canada to see the full list)
Pierre Poilievre, Conservative: 40,548 (80.4%)
Bonnie Critchley, Independent: 5,013 (9.9%)
Darcy Spady, Liberal: 2,174 (4.3%)
Katherine Swampy, NDP: 1,050 (2.1%)
Grant Abraham, United Party: 773 (1.5%)
Jonathan Bridges, People’s Party: 137 (0.3%)
Ashley MacDonald, Green Party: 116 (0.2%)
Michael Harris, Libertarian: 102 (0.2%)
Jeff Willerton, Christian Heritage: 91 (0.2%)
Sarah Spanier, Independent: 53 (0.1%)
Coming in second was Independent candidate and armed forces veteran Bonnie Critchley who stylized herself as the local conservative choice and called out Monsieur Poilievre as an outsider and parachute candidate in the riding. Over the course of the by-election, her campaign had become somewhat of a cause célèbre among liberals on social media who had hoped she could give Poilievre a run for his money or defeat him like Bruce Fanjoy did in Carleton.
But it wasn’t even close. Critchley finished with 9.9 percent of the vote, which is actually respectable in a bedrock Conservative riding like this one, but she came nowhere near threatening Poilievre’s return to the House of Commons.
Liberal candidate Darcy Spady finished third with 4.3 percent. This is big drop from the 11 percent earned by the Liberal Party candidate in the recent federal election but still higher than the party’s worst ever showing in the riding (that was 2 percent in the 2011 federal election). I expect a lot of people who voted Liberal a few months ago switched their votes to Critchley in this by-election because they thought she had a better chance.
NDP candidate Katherine Swampy, who has run in this riding and neighbouring ridings before, earned 2.1 percent of the vote.
And as for the Longest Ballot Committee? The protest group’s slate of 204 candidates earned a combined 321 votes. More than 70 of their candidates earned zero votes in the write-in ballot election. They were out maneuvered by Elections Canada in this by-election but unless election rules are changed, expect to see this mischievous group inflate the ballot in another by-election coming soon.
While much of the non-Conservative vote and attention consolidated around Critchley’s campaign, the message the voting results should send to Liberals, New Democrats, and progressives is that you can’t just parachute into a overwhelmingly Conservative rural riding like this on day 1 of a campaign and expect to do well.
The Conservatives do so well in ridings like Battle River—Crowfoot not just because the people who live in the riding strongly self-identify as conservatives, but the Conservative Party spends a lot of time talking about the issues that matter to these voters and works hard in between elections to keep their organization strong.
There were probably a lot of liberals and NDP who did not bother voting.
Fuck fuck fuck.
I was really hoping for some kind of miracle even though knowledgable people like you predicted this.
Oh well. I am a native person and expect better of people, society, governments, and even corporations and churches.