The book is available in print, ebook and audio book formats.
[Chapter One] [Chapter Two] [Chapter Three] [Chapter Four] [Chapter Five] [Chapter Six] [Chapter Seven] [Chapter Eight]
A Recipe for Making Crumble
The days that followed April 28, 2025, were a little bit surreal. Bruce Fanjoy had not only shocked the leader of the Conservative party, he’d stunned an entire country.
Everyone wanted to talk to him and ask him how he’d done it.
Bruce, very patiently, told and retold his story. How he delivered a blow to toxic conservatism by standing in the way of it. He did that by meeting as many people as possible in his riding of Carleton and by convincing them that he was offering a better option.
People told him all the time that he was brave. And for sure he was a little nervous at the beginning. But he quickly realized that, save for a few exceptions, most people in the riding are extremely kind. They work hard, look after their family, and want to do their part to make the world better.
Voters in Carleton share with voters in every other riding in the country a sense of disconnect between who they are, and who represents them. There is a serious problem in politics when we as voters feel the people we elect are a little remote from our daily struggles.
Fanjoy is one man who won a seat in only one riding. But he has campaigned on being a good and honest representative of Carleton in the House of Commons.
He campaigned with confidence that the voters of his riding, including traditional conservatives, can do better than what they got with two decades of Pierre Poilievre.
In the early days, he used to say he was doing addition by subtraction. That removing a politician who’d shown himself to be hostile to the values and issues Carleton’s voters hold dear, he would improve things for them overnight.
When asked, he’d say he was doing it because he couldn’t not. He has children, and maybe one day he’ll have grandchildren, too. “I can’t sit on my hands as people threaten to make their Canada one that is less free and less healthy than the one that I received from my parents,” he told me early on in his campaign.
That is, incidentally, the reason why I agreed to join him in this adventure. I am not a member of any political party, and I’ve voted for pretty much all of them over the course of my adult life. I didn’t help Bruce Fanjoy because I wanted to make the Liberals look good. I helped him because I have kids, and I’m damned if I don’t do anything to make sure they have at least as many rights as I had at their age.
One lesson I took from this exercise is that while voters were OK enough having someone like Pierre Poilievre represent them at the local level, they were not ready to have him, aggressive politics and all, become prime minister.
The people who know Pierre Poilievre the most turned out in force to say no, thank you. And instead of reacting with humility, Poilievre reacted by running to the safest Conservative riding he could find in Alberta without saying a word of gratitude for the people he’d represented for 20 years.
Conclusion
Shortly after the April 28 election someone went to check in on Don Urquhart, the journalist who’d been “appled” by Pierre Poilievre in 2023.
“It would be fair to say I feel a substantial degree of satisfaction that Pierre Poilievre lost, not just the election but his own seat,” the editor of the Times Chronicle in B.C.’s South Okanagan said in a statement to Press Progress.
“This surely won’t be the end of Poilievre or the masterminds of his political persona,” Urquhart added, “but at least for now, Canada has dodged a bullet.”
The re-election of the Liberal minority government, with Mark Carney as prime minister, was an expression of Canadians’ rejection not just of Donald Trump and his threats of annexation, but of toxic politics more generally.
In the week following the election, Carney went to Washington for a visit with Trump and members of his cabinet (including Vice-President J.D. Vance), during which he called Trump a “transformational” president.
Trump liked that word, which he viewed positively. But the word can also be … less than positive.
Basic rules of diplomacy prevent Carney from being explicit about which one he meant, but we can guess. I’m going to say that regardless of intentions, the word was precise and accurate. Predictive, too.
On May 3, Australian voters pulled a Canuck and clearly rejected the Trumpian party and leader in their election. On May 18, Romania did the same.
The optimist in me wants to say the Canadian election was the first of a series of electoral rejections for nastiness and selfishness in politics, and a return towards more centrist and – I’ll just say “grown-up” kind of politics.
We’re not voting this way because we’re suddenly nice and rational. We’re still the same humans. But we’re reacting to what’s happening in the United States by saying a big fat “no thank you” to the politics of fear, the politics of anger and resentment, the politics of greed and grift, and the politics of hate and intolerance.
We like due process, the rule of law and the writ of habeas corpus. We do not want to live in a world where political opponents get disappeared. We cannot tolerate random and arbitrary deportations of people to cruel prisons overseas, without so much as a hearing.
There is opposition to Donald Trump in the United States, but there’s even stronger opposition to him outside the United States. Because we see where this stuff can lead and enough of us are showing up to say, nope.
Not here. Not in my name. Not in my country.
Bruce Fanjoy saw, in 2023, that history had a date with the riding of Carleton. He decided to do what he could to play a role in defeating the politics of toxicity.
We don’t have to be victims of politicians who want to use us for their personal profit or benefit. We are not victims. We have voices. Tools. Institutions of governance. Laws. Fundamental rights.
As long as we continue to exercise our rights and to insist on politics where dissent is not only allowed but welcome, as long as we refuse to cower in silence, as long as we stand up to fight when a fight is necessary, we’ll be doing the right thing and contributing to a better world.
That’s all we can ask of anyone.
Afterword
Bruce Fanjoy was sworn in as Member of Parliament for Carleton on the afternoon of Saturday, May 24. It is a constitutional requirement after each election. Members must swear or affirm an oath of allegiance to the sovereign, who embodies Canadians, our institutions and Constitution.
Bruce chose an affirmation, which he said both in English and in French in front of members of his family, his campaign staff and those of us who’d been working with him since the beginning, in 2023.
Nobody cried, but it got close.
After all the work, all the doors, all the handshakes, all the tweets, all the debates and all the phone conversations, the most unlikely rookie politician you’ll ever meet signed the big book and received his pin – a unique design that identifies him as an MP.
There is also a pin for spouses of MPs, which I didn’t know. It makes a lot of sense, actually, and it’s one of those small but meaningful things that can make life so much better for the families of those who serve in Parliament.
He had brought with him a little piece of rock, a souvenir from a hike out west many years ago that had proven challenging for the group with whom he was attempting to reach the summit.
They were successful after starting their climb in the middle of the night, trudging through the night with only headlamps and determination leading the way.
They reached the summit just as the sun was coming up.
The lesson, he told the group, is that sometimes to accomplish great things you must go through dark periods. But if you keep at it, keep putting one foot in front of the other, sooner or later you will accomplish great things.
And with that, Bruce Fanjoy began his career as a real, professional politician.
