This may be more interesting than I thought
CTV News Pierre Byelection Archive
The election results in the byelection riding from Spring 2025.
What's interesting is that even though it's only 4 months later, only the PPC candidate Bridges is running again from the major parties. The Liberals, NDP & Greens also have new candidates like the Conservatives with Pierre.
Not sure what that says. Maybe the other candidates are still broke & haven't repaid expenses from the April campaign. Maybe it's no fun going for a second crushing defeat in a calendar year. Maybe it wasn't a great experience running for parties with no support & little chance.
The PPC guy apparently ran in another Alberta riding in 2021 and won 10% during the COVID election. But then his riding got redistributed and got destroyed like the rest of the PPC with support dropping to 1.5% in the new one last April.
Other than the ridiculous 200+ fake candidates from the Long Ballot protest assholes, there's also several independents and minor parties running this time in the riding that didn't in April. There's a 22 year veteran female cop who is mad that Pierre got dropped into the riding (and has weird astroturfed national progressive media pieces written about her & shitting on Pierre). There's also something called the United Party and its leader Grant Abraham who apparently previously ran for office in the UK.
The CTV link talks about the Electoral Office deciding to hand out blank write-in ballots this time to get around the 200+ ballot list. Apparently with an accompanying reference book with the candidate names.
The CTV article notes that advance polling this time is around 14k, similar to April. The byelection is next Monday the 18th. I wonder if advanced polls are high again this time not because of interest in Pierre, but because there's probably more absenteeism for a summer Monday election with people working, away on vacation, out at camp, playing summer beer league softball, etc.
The Wiki blurb about the PPC candidate talked about Max campaigning in the riding with Bridges and mentioned that one of them supported Alberta succession. I couldn't tell if they were attributing it to the local PPC guy Bridges or Max, because I'd be surprised if Bernier was outright supporting Alberta independence considering he's supposed to be running a national party.
Thought this quote from the journoscum from the CTV piece was pretty weaselly, trying to conflate the popular vote for the Pierre in the byelection with his percentage of member support in his upcoming Jan 2026 leadership review. Particularly since it's a "gotcha" question with the incumbent who stepped down getting an insane 83% of the riding vote in April.
The journoscum are trying to create a narrative that if Poilievre doesn't convincingly overperform this 83% popular vote figure that the old MP Kurek did in April, that somehow this suggests that he no longer has a mandate to continue on as Conservative opposition leader.
Which is really a pants-on-head retarded obfuscation narrative, suggesting that hicks in a riding in rural Alberta are representative of his support in his party and the country as a whole.
When I was reading on the riding Wiki about some of the other wacky independent byelection candidates, the old female cop's bio had some quote about her being the "accepted frontrunning threat to challenge Pierre". It had a citation, which led to
some National Observer publication (funded by Trudeau bucks) and a weird hit piece from Max Fawcett (an insufferable agitprop opinion columnist). The piece doesn't even include any statements claiming this old lady cop is a frontrunner or in second place. The piece was still full of snark about how the entire country just wants Poilievre to quit because his anti-Carney rhetoric is exhausting & divisive. And how nobody likes him, he's going to lose his leadership review, this byelection is a referendum on his popularity if he doesn't overachieve the last rando with 347% of the popular vote, blah, blah, blah.
I don't even like Poilievre, but his critics are demons.
