‘He took the riding for granted,’ says Liberal who unseated Poilievre

Bruce Fanjoy, Liberal MP-Elect for Carleton, reflects on the campaign after defeating Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre for the seat he's held for 20 years.

Bruce Fanjoy, the Liberal rookie who unseated Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in his longtime Ottawa-area riding, says he wasn’t surprised he won.

“With (Prime Minister) Mark Carney’s leadership, suddenly I had the wind at my back. We could see that in all the communities and in the riding,” Fanjoy said in an interview with CTV’s Power Play host Vassy Kapelos on Tuesday.

“We just kept working, and Pierre, God bless him, he took the riding for granted,” Fanjoy added. “And people don’t like to be taken for granted, so I think that opened the door for people to consider a change in Carleton.”

In a significant upset, Poilievre lost in the Carleton riding by about 4,300 votes.

A career politician — and the youngest MP in Parliament at the time of his first election win — Poilievre had been elected and re-elected to his Ottawa-area riding seven consecutive times, before losing to Fanjoy.

Fanjoy, a former “private sector and community leader,” according to his campaign website, said he hasn’t heard from Poilievre since the results came down, but he wishes him “the best.”

The MP-elect added he “can’t wait to get to work for the people of Carleton.” He largely credited his ground game, and “knocking on doors for over two years,” for what he says was an unsurprising win.

“I think we focused on the process all along,” Fanjoy told Kapelos. “What do we need to do today to move this campaign forward? And we did that day after day, and in the belief that if we do things right every day, the numbers will take care of themselves,” he added.

Poilievre, a prominent opposition critic for most of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s tenure, was an early frontrunner in the race to replace former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole in 2022. He went on to secure a landslide first-ballot victory.

It was also a significant victory when Poilievre first won the riding in 2004, formerly called Nepean—Carleton, now Carleton. At the time, he defeated two-term incumbent and then-Liberal defence minister David Pratt.

Ballot counting in the riding began six hours before the polls closed to account for the added time it would take to tally the votes.

The riding saw the highest number of advanced voters than anywhere else in the country. Plus, with 91 names on it, each ballot was about a metre long, and Elections Canada estimated it could take about three times as long to count each one, factoring the time it would take to unfold and tally each one.

Despite losing his seat, Poilievre has signalled he plans to stay at the helm of the Conservatives.

You can watch Fanjoy’s full interview on CTV Power Play with Vassy Kapelos in the video player at the top of this article.

With files from CTV News national correspondent Rachel Aiello