Lessons learned by losing candidates

While the spotlight is already moving off the candidates who didn't get the most votes in Monday's federal election, the also-rans have valuable insights to share.

The Citizen caught up with some of the candidates who won't be representing the ridings they contested to learn about their takeaways from thousands of voter conversations, their positions on the performance of party leaders and why they think they weren't the winning candidates.

Gustave Roy, the Liberal candidate who failed to supplant Carleton's Conservative incumbent, Pierre Poilievre, was picking up one of his campaign signs Tuesday when a voter came up to celebrate.

“He was like, `Oh, my God, we won.' And then I was like, `Well, no, we didn't win,'” Roy recalled.

“He was really concerned until he realized that, `Oh, it was you that lost. Oh, OK … that's fine. But we did win.'”

One of the lessons of the campaign, for Roy, is that many electors are voting for the prime minister and not the local candidate.

And, while he thinks Justin Trudeau did a very good job during the campaign, the “national narrative,” like criticism targeting the decision to call an election at this time, didn't always help Roy's position as an alternative to the riding 's status quo.

Roy said he also learned how difficult it could be to get your point across.

In times of uncertainty, he thinks people gravitate toward simple explanations and not necessarily accurate ones. Try offering an explanation about inflation in a minute. “It's not possible, and it's not right.”

But articulating a message that's more complicated, Roy said, “Sometimes … you lose people.”

In Ottawa Centre, with special-ballot results still to come, third-place Conservative candidate Carol Clemenhagen was pleased to see she had already increased her ballot count over 2019.

She said she appreciated Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole's moderate approach, viewing it as a position that aligned with her values as well as those of voters in Ottawa Centre, a politically progressive riding that has historically elected Liberals and New Democrats.

And the more centrist orientation of the party's 2021 platform was something people were happy to see, she heard at their doorsteps.

Clemenhagen, a former healthcare executive, believes her party needs to “continue on its approach of modernizing, thinking about what is it that moderate urban voters are desiring in a conservative party, in a modern conservative party, and going forward with that.”

Voters, she said, “need to have trust that that is in fact the future direction of the party.”

In the suburban-rural riding of Kanata-Carleton, Green candidate Jennifer Purdy said she heard more about internet service than she did about LRT, for which the city needs federal support to build out to Kanata and Stittsville.

For those in urban settings, internet concerns focused on cost, Purdy said, while those in rural areas were preoccupied with its poor quality.

“We were promised that we're going to get LRT and better internet,” she said, a reference to campaign pledges by Jenna Sudds, the Liberal elected in the riding.

“So I, along with other constituents, will be waiting with bated breath for that.”

As for her own party, Purdy — who had 2.7 per cent of the counted vote as of Tuesday, less than half her share in 2019 — said she thought that leader Annamie Paul did an excellent job during the campaign. The Greens, she said, needed to “just kind of hash out what worked and what didn't work and obviously figure things out for the next election.”

The Gatineau riding's Bloc Québécois candidate, Geneviève Nadeau, said she heard from many residents planning to vote for her party for the first time.

Some were motivated by the now-infamous debate moderator question to her party leader about “discriminatory” Quebec legislation — “a lot of people were telling me that they were happy that Yves-François Blanchet stood up for us,” Nadeau said — while others wanted a minority government and were going to vote strategically for the Bloc as the strongest party in Gatineau after the Liberals, in terms of previous showing.

Liberal incumbent Steven MacKinnon ultimately took almost half the vote, to her 23 per cent, and Nadeau had a few early ideas about what may have kept her from victory. For one, she knows some locals are scared about the independence question “even though the Bloc Québécois could never start a referendum” and who may have coalesced in the Liberal camp.

There are also many in the riding who work or have loved ones employed in the federal public service, she said, who fear the prospect of Conservative job cuts — a spectre the Liberals conjured up during the campaign.