Pierre Poilievre, Greek Tragedy?

That's what you call it when you get nearly everything you want, and come away a loser.

When I was a kid, this was a painting by Bruegel. Now it may not be. Life, and tragedy, comes at you fast. Source: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1555-1558), After Peter Bruegel the Elder. Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t bet on politics, but if I did, I’d be comfortable wagering it all that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre will win his by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot on August 18th. The Conservatives won that riding with just over 82 percent last spring in the general election. It was a typical showing for them. In the last twenty years, the party has won over 80 percent of the vote in the riding seven out of eight times. The other time, it won 71 percent of it. Battle River-Crowfoot is one of the safest Conservative ridings in the country, which is probably why Poilievre is running there in the first place.

The Conservative leader lost his Ottawa-area seat on election night in April. It was an unthinkable defeat, and the networks were slow to call the race for Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy. But Poilievre lost, and Fanjoy won. In the aftermath of the double defeat, the election and the riding, Poilievre managed to stay on as leader, but it’s the sort of failure you can really only get away with once, if you’re lucky. If he were to lose the by-election — again, beyond unlikely — it would cap a political story that is as much tragedy as it is comedy. But another loss isn’t a necessary condition for us to call Poilievre’s arc a tragedy in the classical Greek sense.

As we approach the three-month anniversary of the federal election, I’ve been thinking about Poilievre's tragic turn. I do mean “tragic” in the Greek sense of a decline and fall marked by dramatic irony. I wasn’t upset to see him lose. I don’t regard it as unwelcome in the least. But it is tragic.

During and after the election, I noted a few times that Poilievre’s story had a quality to it that Sophocles or Euripides would recognize. He is a true believer in his right-wing cause and a man who has for a very long time wanted to become prime minister. He won the leadership of his party easily. As the Liberals and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dropped in the polls, Poilievre looked destined to fulfill his ambition — and his agenda. At one point, he was up roughly 25 points. All that was left was for him to be shooed into office. He wanted, and demanded, an election. And not just any election, but a carbon tax election. He insisted that the government must put carbon pricing to the people once more. He was sure they’d choose to “axe the tax.” In a way, they did.

In December of last year, Chrystia Freeland, finance minister at the time, quit Cabinet. Her departure was a blow to Trudeau. It came as a handful of Liberal members of Parliament called for their leader to resign, to make way for someone who might have a shot at saving the red team’s furniture. Commentators echoed the call, warning that Trudeau was a spent force. Donald Trump had won the US election in November, giving the Trudeau Liberals an outside chance at a comeback now that they had an external foil, part bogeyman and part legitimate threat, but Trudeau remained an anchor. Then he quit. Mark Carney won a speedy leadership contest, became prime minister, zeroed-out the carbon tax, talked tough on Trump, made a quick visit to the United Kingdom and France, and then called a general election.

Back in March, author Mark Bourrie asked in the Walrus, adapting a bit from his book Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, whether Poilievre had got the election he wanted too late. The Conservatives were still running against Trudeau despite the fact that Carney was by no means a carbon copy of his predecessor, and the voters didn’t believe he was. Trump’s attacks on Canada were intensifying. The country rallied around the flag in a show of shallow but intense nationalism. Poilievre was still selling “Canada is broken” as his fellow citizens were waving flags, boycotting American products and travel, and looking with favour upon a new prime minister who was talking about building, about transforming, about having a plan for all of it, whatever “it” was. Suddenly, Poilievre was out of step with the moment, falling in the polls like Icarus into the sparkling Aegean Sea.

As Bourrie put it a month before election day

Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherent genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country, and exploits class envy. By the early winter of 2025, the political gears of the country changed. The political fight in Canada quickly became about who was best to face the external threat and whose ideas were best to help Canadian families and businesses at a time of real danger. On April 28, we’ll know if his brand of politics will survive the very crisis it claimed to prepare for.

Poilievre’s brand of politics did not survive the crisis it claimed to prepare for; or, at least, it didn’t succeed in prevailing against Carney this time around. Against all odds, the Liberals formed a minority government and were a handful of votes away from a majority — a mere 611 according to Dan Arnold’s calculations. The Tories weren’t all that far behind themselves, though. A handful of observers noted that but for something like 15,000 votes in the right spots, the Conservatives would have won the election. That might sound like a lot of votes, but it’s not in a country where nearly 20 million electors cast a ballot. Indeed, if those calculations are correct, the Conservatives were just 0.075 percent away from winning. But that’s not the point. The point is that weeks earlier, the party was up 25 points.

The collapse in the polls after getting the election you demanded, though against an unexpected and unwelcome opponent, is enough to qualify Poilievre’s story as a tragedy. But there’s more. Carney swiftly adopted policies consistent with what the Conservatives had long called for or preferred, including axing the carbon tax, cutting personal income taxes, pursuing infrastructure projects, spending on the military, cancelling the planned increase in the capital gains inclusion rate, and scrapping the digital services tax. And the Liberals, under Carney, got credit for it all, including reversals of their own (recent) policies. Poilievre got what he wanted, the election and the policies, but it cost him everything and left him short of his ultimate goal of becoming prime minister. Tell me Euripides wouldn’t have had a field day with that.

The government is now enjoying a honeymoon period, and a 7 point lead in the polls. Poilievre is stuck waiting until late-August for his by-election date. But the thing about tragic arcs is that they aren’t always contained, discrete things. The Liberals are up today, but so too were they in 2015 before their decline. The country’s history is full of rivalries, twists, turns, and reversals of fate and fortune — Macdonald and Laurier, King and Meighen, Diefenbaker and Pearson, (Pierre) Trudeau and all kinds of people, Mulroney and himself, Martin and, well, also himself. Few prime ministers meet a happy career end on their own terms. Understanding Canadian politics calls for having a long memory and resisting the urge to assume an exception for one’s own side. Today, we tell Poilievre’s tragic tale. Tomorrow, it may be Carney’s. But whatever happens, to whomever, it will be hard to top the story of the Tory who got what he wanted and, at least for a time, lost it all.