Prime Minister Mark Carney kept his promise yesterday and expeditiously called a by-election in Alberta’s Battle River-Crowfoot riding so that seatless Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre can return to the House of Commons as soon as possible.
For those of you who have been in a coma or on a desert island without an Internet connection since before April 28, there needs to be a by-election because no sooner had Mr. Poilievre been defeated in the Ottawa-area riding he’d represented for more than 20 years than Battle-River Crowfoot MP Damien Kurek promised to quit to give Mr. Poilievre a safe seat in which to run. He kept that promise on June 17.
And that seat’s so safe that if Mr. Poilievre can’t win there, he couldn’t be elected dog catcher if we elected dog catchers in Canada. (And if you don’t know the answer to that riddle, best find another blog to read.)
Tout le monde Canadian politics understands that the Conservatives could run anyone – or any thing – in Battle River Crowfoot and win. Dinosaurs once roamed that huge territory east of both Edmonton and Calgary running all the way to the Saskatchewan border, and if you go by politics, some still do.
The by-election will be held on Aug. 18, said Mr. Carney’s minimalist 27-word press release.
Since everyone agrees that the outcome of the by-election is a foregone conclusion, that means Mr. Poilievre will only have to put up with being called the Stornoway Squatter for 48 and a half more days.
If you look at the current policies of the Carney Government and the platform of Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives in the lead-up to the April 28 federal election, you’ll notice that there’s less light between the two parties than you’d expect if you paid any attention to the hysterical Conservative rhetoric we hear every day out here in Wild Rose Country.
Still, they are political rivals, so it is unusual for both parties to want so urgently to get Mr. Poilievre back into the House of Commons.
The Conservatives are determined to stick with Mr. Poilievre because, having gone full MAGA in their disastrous 2025 election campaign, they have decided to double down and expect a different result next time. This, as we know, is the pop culture definition of insanity, even if Albert Einstein never actually said any such thing.
The Liberals will be delighted to see Mr. Poilievre back in the House of Commons as quickly as possible for, essentially, the same reason. Mr. Poilievre’s extremism allowed them to pull the fat from the fryer in April and they believe he can do the same thing for them another time if he sticks around.
As Napoleon is reputed to have mused, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake. Indeed, if you can give the enemy a hand in such circumstances, the Liberals must have thought, why the heck not do it?
Carleton MP Bruce Fanjoy, the Liberal who knocked off Mr. Poilievre on April 28, made a little fun of of the Conservative leader back on May 18, when he observed on social media that “the margin in Battle River-Crowfoot was over 45,000 votes. Why is a by-election required there?”
That was, presumably, sarcasm. Everybody knows we can’t just go appointing Conservatives in rural Alberta or we’d never have any elections out here. Of course, that day may be coming soon enough if Alberta Premier Danielle Smith gets to realize her dream of being the first president of the Republic of Alberta, but that’s a topic for another day.
Given that kind of sniping, I’d wondered if Liberals might not even bother running a candidate to challenge Mr. Poilievre. That kind of traditional courtesy would not have been without precedent in Canadian political history.
Nevertheless, yesterday the Liberals named Petroleum Engineer Darcy Spady as their standard bearer in the riding. Mr. Spady grew up in Three Hills, within the riding’s boundaries, but the party news release didn’t actually say where he lives now. But he’s the manager of a Calgary-based company that provides “decarbonization solutions for the energy industry,” the Carbon Connect International website says.
Well, it’s not as if Mr. Poilievre can accuse him of being a carpetbagger, is it?
Mr. Spady and his wife Laurie have created a University of Alberta scholarship that “assists students from rural communities studying the arts and humanities while also pursuing a major or minor in religious studies.”
It will be interesting to see if the federal NDP runs a candidate. It would be a wonderful and much needed opportunity for the party, which took a pasting on April 28, to demand answers from Mr. Poilievre on tough questions about where he stands on Canada’s public health care system and on the Alberta separation project being promoted by the province’s United Conservative Party.
That would also be an excellent way to demonstrate to voters throughout Canada that there are real differences between the NDP and the Liberals, something that became quite unclear in the seven and a half years after Jagmeet Singh became the party’s leader. Mr. Singh resigned as leader on May 5.
Meanwhile, according to The Globe and Mail, more than 200 people affiliated with the Longest Ballot Committee, a group that advocates for electoral reform in Canada, have signed up to have their names on the ballot in Battle River-Crowfoot.
The group flooded the ballot in Carleton with 85 of the 91 candidates on the ballot, giving rise to conspiracy theories in Conservative circles. Their efforts, while annoying, would not have changed the outcome of the election in the riding, though.