An Alberta riding sizes up Pierre Poilievre as its next MP

Hamilton Spectator

4 days ago

CAMROSE, ALTA. — The balloons have long since deflated and drifted back to earth, the lawn signs and ballot boxes packed away. In most of the country, anyway.
But for Pierre Poilievre, the election campaign never really ended. After the Conservative leader lost the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton, which he'd held for 21 years, to a Liberal newcomer, he was cast out into the proverbial wilderness. Specifically, to a sprawling rural Alberta riding where the freshly re-elected Tory MP stepped down, allowing Poilievre a chance to win the seat in a byelection and rejoin the party he leads in the House of Commons.
It's a significant change of scenery. His old riding was a compact slice of suburban Ottawa, popular with civil servants. The one he hopes to win now, Battle River-Crowfoot, is one of the biggest and least densely populated in the country, with only a handful of small towns knitted together by two-lane roads across a massive swatch of land that is a rich agricultural base in the north and coulees and hoodoos and prehistoric dinosaur fossil beds in the south. Picture the population of Thunder Bay spread out over an area bigger than Denmark.
Poilievre has arrived just as canola — Alberta's
most profitable
cash crop — is at its most brilliant yellow. The occasional pumpjack bobs against the sky.
This is one of the safest Conservative ridings in the country; in the last election, only one other riding voted more overwhelmingly blue. (The Liberals and NDP are nonetheless running candidates, energy leader
Darcy Spady
and former Samson Cree band councillor
Katherine Swampy
, respectively.) So in some ways, Poilievre — whose office did not respond to requests for comment for this story — is playing on easy mode. But beyond the matter of a seat, there's the pressure to show he's learned from his most recent loss and that he can still pitch himself as a true alternative to his fellow Albertan, a still-in-his-honeymoon-phase Mark Carney.
'A lot of people are writing him off, and I think people are writing him off at their own peril,' says Ben Woodfinden, Poilievre's former communications director.
'If, a couple years from now, he goes on to become prime minister, the comeback starts here.'
And that's just where the rest of the country is concerned. Here in the riding, residents say he needs to earn it — to show he can put in the work and fend off criticism that he's just here to further his political career. 'If you're asking if we're star struck,' one resident said dryly, 'the answer is no.'
In other words, one of his biggest competitors may be himself.
'You are going to put on some miles,' said Camrose Mayor PJ Stasko of waging a political campaign in the area. Stasko has been an elected official in the former railway town turned health-care hub, which is now the riding's largest city with 20,000 people, for more than a decade. 'You need to be present — and have a presence.'
People in the riding are aware that a party leader has a separate job to do, he says. Still, Damien Kurek, the farmer turned MP who stepped down to make way for Poilievre, was popular because of his deep knowledge of the area, he adds, and voters will be looking for the same.
As campaign pageantry goes, the grand opening of an office usually ranks low. 'Nobody really gives a s—t about opening a campaign office,' as Blain Fowler, publisher of the Camrose Booster, put it.
Nonetheless, Poilievre's campaign office in a Camrose strip mall wasn't far from the cream-coloured stucco building where Fowler's parents founded the Booster in 1952.
With speeches scheduled for 7 p.m., Fowler busied himself in his office past normal working hours so he wouldn't be the first person there. But when he drove up around 6:30 p.m., there wasn't a parking spot in sight.
Counting the cars jammed into every possible spot, Fowler estimated there must have already been hundreds of people there, a number he found astounding for a small town on a Wednesday evening in the middle of summer.
That turnout speaks to the power of the Conservative brand here, Fowler says, but also to the fact that the Poilievre who has come West is not the House of Commons question period scrapper, but a more 'mellow' version. He has driven to the smallest of the small towns and shown up to rodeos and community barbecues and parades, often in the cowboy hat demanded by Alberta election campaigns.
'Losing Carleton probably weighs on him — I know it weighs on him,' says Woodfinden, adding that he's also seen a softer side of Poilievre in recent interviews. (He stopped working for Poilievre in April.)
'When I worked for him I don't think we ever used the term 'government in waiting,' but he used that term himself a couple of weeks ago. I think that tells you a bit about their mindset, that they are trying to be more statesmanly, more prime ministerial.'
The long history of people coming from the East to tell people here what their problems are and how to solve them has left many of them sensitive to outsiders, Fowler says. (A couple of years ago, some bank executives came to town to talk to customers about why a potential amalgamation plan would benefit the area, he said. As soon as they started talking about cows, the word used by the dairy industry, as opposed to cattle, the preferred term of ranchers, they lost the room entirely, he recalled.)
Sometimes, the details of specific policies seem to matter less than the way they add up, especially if the governing class doesn't quite get the appeal or the challenge of living in a place like this.
Dominant concerns in the riding include support for major industries like agriculture and oil and gas. Threats to the oil industry in particular can feel as much existential as economic in this part of the province, which is home to both local oilfields and to people who commute north to the oilsands.
And Poilievre, who has lived in Ottawa for much of his adult life, seems to be listening.
People here have voted for right-wing parties since the Great Depression. The only blot on that copybook came in the late 1970s, when 'Cactus Jack' Horner, a fiery rancher and seven-term MP from a prairie political dynasty, crossed the floor to join Pierre Trudeau's Liberals. (Horner was swiftly voted out at the next opportunity. As his brother put it in
his obituary
, the people loved Jack, but they hated Trudeau more.)
Given the history and based on past results, it's largely a 'done deal' that Poilievre will win the seat on Aug. 18, says poll analyst Eric Grenier.
But success can be measured in different ways, and Grenier believes Poilievre's margin of victory will matter. Given the historic support for Conservative candidates — the previous MP got almost 83 per cent of the votes cast — he says anything below about 80 per cent won't be great. 'If he's under 70, I would say that that was a bad result.'
Making Poilievre's job harder is the fact that his personal approval rating has dipped since his election loss to 44 per cent, according to a
Research Co poll
, putting him 15 points behind Carney. Then there's the fact that he will have to navigate Alberta-style conservatism, which has always had a slightly more independent, if not contrarian flavour, than the federal variety. That said,
blogger Dave Cournoyer
noted that at least a couple of local United Conservative Party MLAs have been seen campaigning with Poilievre, suggesting some of the wrinkles between the two parties have been ironed out.
But many headlines have been made in recent weeks by surging separatist sentiment in the province, particularly among right leaning voters. That sentiment has been fuelled by the idea that Ottawa has taken for Alberta for granted, and Premier Danielle Smith's suggestion that there could be a referendum on the province separating from Canada. People in Battle River — Crowfoot dismiss the idea that there is true support for a separate Alberta, pointing to a recent provincial byelection in which Cam Davies of the pro-separatist Alberta Republican party finished in third place. They add that Davies was even beaten by the NDP candidate — a truly dismal showing in rural Alberta. It suggests, they say, that the issue is more hat than cattle.
Still, there are plenty of Albertans who are keen to push for a revised relationship with Ottawa, even if that vigour falls short of separation. Poilievre has said repeated he is for a united Canada but told
CBC Radio's The House
last week that the days of Alberta being asked to 'pay up and shut up' should be over.
Then there are those who would like to return to what they say is a more traditional form of progressive Alberta conservatism — and turn away from what they argue is a more combative style imported from Ottawa.
'Much like me, my neighbours don't tend to really care what's in your pants or who you're sleeping with. Just don't do it in front of an open window,' said Bonnie Critchley, sitting in a cafe in Tofield, population roughly 2,000. 'They don't care. They want to deal with their crops. They would like their car to not lose a tire in that pothole. They want their taxes low.'
Critchley is a fifth generation military veteran who decided to come out of retirement to try her hand at politics when she saw Kurek, a popular MP who had just received an overwhelming mandate, step down to make way for the Conservative party leader. 'I looked around and said, somebody should do something,' she said, looking theatrically over each shoulder. That person, she eventually concluded, would have to be her.
(She says people have compared her to Bruce Fanjoy, the stay-at-home dad turned Liberal candidate who defeated Poilievre in his old riding, but insists her situation is very different. 'He had two years, I've got one month.')
Critchley is running against Poilievre as an independent, with a flat-out campaign that has generated buzz within the province and, she says, significant donations from outside it.
In a rare point of policy overlap, both she and Poilievre have spoken out against the 'longest ballot' protest planned for the riding; its advocates hope to get dozens of names on the ballot for the byelection to promote their advocacy of proportional representation. Critchley says such tactics just drown out legitimate independent contenders like herself.
But she also says she's worried that Poilievre only wants to become the MP for Battle River-Crowfoot for his own political gain. And, as someone who wears one regularly — she moved back to the riding to help with the family horse breeding operation — it rankles her to see him suddenly wearing a cowboy hat.
Even if he wins, she believes he won't stick around to represent her neighbours in the House of Commons if he loses an upcoming review of his leadership.
So Critchley is challenging Poilievre with a platform drawn from both sides of the political aisle — she affirms the existence of climate change but rejects a carbon tax and vows to protect both lawful gun owners and the LGBTQ+ community — with a helping of Albertan determination.
'We all know that the election is over once it passes the western border of Ontario,' she said. 'We know that, we're tired and we're frustrated.
'But this is our home, our riding,' she added. 'We are not to be taken advantage of. We will not give you something because you say we should.'