Well, It Happened
Published at 09:46 on 29 April 2025
And it happened pretty much why I said it might.
It’s clear what happened the moment you look at the results and compare them to what happened in 2021:
| Party | 2021 | 2025 (Preliminary) |
|---|---|---|
| Liberal | 32.62% | 43.6% | Conservative | 33.74% | 41.4% |
| Bloc Québécois | 7.64% | 6.4% |
| New Democratic | 17.82% | 6.3% |
| Green | 2.33% | 1.2% |
Despite being widely-heralded as the losers of this election, the Conservatives actually increased the number of votes they received, and significantly so. To give you an idea how significant a 41.4% vote share is, that is better than the Conservatives ever received under the leadership of Stephen Harper, a three-term Conservative PM. You have to go back to Brian Mulroney to find a Conservative party leader that did better at the ballot box than Poilievre just did.
The above is doubtless why, despite having just lost both the election and his own seat in Parliament, he has announced his intention to stay on as party leader. (But it’s not entirely up to him. Justin Trudeau really wanted to remain the leader of the Liberals, and we all know how that one played out.)
The rub is, lots of Bloc, Green, and particularly NDP voters practiced strategic voting, voting against what they least wanted (i.e. Pierre Poilievre becoming PM), instead of voting their normal party preference.
Despite winning, the Liberals won’t have a majority of the seats. This means that should they so choose, the minor parties could cooperate with the Conservatives and vote to bring the government down.
It is my view that this is precisely what they should threaten to do unless the Liberals agree to pass election reform (most likely some form of ranked-choice voting), that enables voters to vote their preference without having to pay the cost of an outcome they regard as particularly averse. One of the rules of politics is that if you have power, use it.