1. It wasn’t close. The race was called after the first poll reported, and the final result was a blowout victory for Pierre Poilievre with 80.4 percent of the vote. In the recent federal election, only six MPs won their seats with a higher percentage. The seeds of doubt sown by partisan pundits about what it would mean if Poilievre significantly underperformed his predecessor as MP, Damien Kurek, landed on stony ground.
2. Byelections are volatile things that often throw up strange results, but this one was as straightforward as it gets. Despite the meddling of the long ballotters and a high-profile local conservative veteran running as an independent and directly challenging Poilievre, if not from his Right, then on more or less the same ground, the result was about as dully predictable as possible. Poilievre’s vote share was actually about half a point higher than the average of Kurek’s three victories.
3. It was a rough night for Alberta separatists in Alberta’s separatist heartland. Poilievre’s riding overlaps with the former provincial riding of Olds-Didsbury, which in a 1982 by-election elected the province’s one and so-far only separatist MLA. While door-knocking, I saw a lot of signs for the United Party (separatist) candidate, but only one was an actual lawn-sign, which was a bad sign for them. In the end, the separatist candidate got less than 2 percent of the vote (fewer than 1,000 votes). In a safe by-election, when voters had nothing to lose by giving vent to legitimate local frustration and casting a protest vote against Ottawa, the voters made it clear that sending Poilievre back east was the best way to send a message.
4. I’ve never seen the Badlands so green in August, or so full of bugs. By the time I got back to Calgary after covering a little over 500 kilometres on election day, it looked like two insect armies had reenacted the Battle of Borodino on my windshield.
5. Words I didn’t hear in Carbon and Three Hills, where I was doing get-out-the-vote work: outsider, carpetbagger, opportunist, loser. Now, I was mostly dealing with CPC-identified voters, but considering they were being asked to trudge to the polls a second time in less than four months, the commitment I heard to the party and the leader was remarkably high. So, remember, when you hear this kind of thing from national media commentators, they are projecting their own views a long way from reality.
