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The first reading is the Canadian Political Newsletter, which is a summary of the campaign every day throughout the 2025 elections, curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an earlier version delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here.
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Liberals condemn large-scale gatherings after the conservative movement, as Tori leader Pierre Poilievre has yet to break the attendance record set by liberals themselves 50 years ago.
On Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people in the Edmonton area attended the first rally in Canada, including Poilievre and former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The party collapsed the local mobile network, both the largest in the 2025 campaign and the largest in the 22-year history of the Modern Conservative Party.
Liberals accused Poilievre of essentially Trump. On April 5, the official Liberal Party X account uploaded a video of Poilievre talking about crowd size and compared it with a similar statement from U.S. President Donald Trump. “Poilievre is fascinated by the size of the crowd. Who does this remind you of?” the post said.
But long before Poilievre attracted a large crowd, a liberal did the same.
If Poilievre wants to break the history of indoor partisan political gatherings, he still has thousands of participants to go until he can violate the benchmark set by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1979.
It was Trudeau’s ultimate loss to Joe Clark, the then-progressive conservative leader. But on May 22, Trudeau’s overflow set at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto was 18,000, which was one of the largest indoor venues in the country at the time.
It is well known that the size of the crowd is difficult to estimate, especially in the era before drones or digital photography – but the numbers for the 1979 rally were reliable because Maple Leaf Gardens had known seating capabilities (16,000 hockey, 16,000 hockey, 18,000 concerts).
It’s not unusual for Trudeau, who has attended several unusually large party gatherings in his 15 years as prime minister.
In Trudeau’s first election, between 25,000 and 40,000 people gathered in 1968 to see him at the place of Montreal, Ville Marie, which made the headlines “another huge Trudeau crowd.”
The 1968 campaign will also bring together a group of people at Toronto’s Citizen Square, an estimated 45,000 people, which was reportedly “the largest political rally in the country’s history.”
Canada’s political culture is traditionally not a feature of all mass gatherings, partly because it is often too cold to host them outside and there are limited options for indoor activities. To date, Canada has only a few indoor venues with seating capacity of more than 20,000.
In 1957, then-progressive conservative leader John Diefenbaker led what historians call the “perfect” movement. The election ended with a record landslide for progressive conservatives, as overwhelmingly intercepted Diffenbaker in hotel lobbies or train stations.
But given the limited venue options in Canada in the 1950s, the Divenbeck Sports never was able to host more than a few thousand parties.
According to reporters at the time, the “climax” of the campaign in 1957 was the “climax” of 6,000 people squeezed into the Georgia auditorium in Vancouver. One participant quoted one in the Vancouver Sun as saying: “I don’t think Canadians have much influence on politics.”
Poilievre’s gatherings are often called in industrial places equipped with standing crowds. That was the case on Monday, with the rally held at an empty warehouse near Edmonton International Airport.
The day before, Poilievre appeared at a warehouse in Penticton, British Columbia, and then the Penticton Herald had an estimated population of 3,000, which is about one-tenth of the city’s population.
Meanwhile, when it comes to political gatherings in general, the record easily belongs to the 1995 “Solunity Rally” convened by Montreal to convince Quebecs to vote “No” in that year’s split referendum. The often repeated estimate is that 100,000 people attended the meeting, including thousands of people riding from neighboring provinces.
The record for Canada’s largest one-day ticketing party is still in 2003, when the Sarstock Rock concert attracted Toronto’s Downsview Park.
The last ride of Giganto ballots
The election will once again feature ridiculous long votes during conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s home ride against Carleton, similar to the election used in the June deputy election on Toronto-ST. Paul’s. It was the work of a longest voting committee, a radical group that found no real material barriers to dozens of independent candidates in a single horse riding. This whole thing may also be the work of the Communist Party. The longest voting committee has multiple featured pages on the official Canadian website.
Conservatives recognize conservatives
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally approved the Conservative Party on Monday night. While it is not that rare for conservatives to recognize conservatives, Harper has participated in the last two federal elections.
Harper’s full recognition speech is here, but what everyone seems to be mentioning is that Harper says conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and liberal Mark Carney used to work for him (Poilievre is a conservative defender who was appointed governor of Bank of Canada by Harper). “In this regard, I chose my choice without hesitation, and there is no doubt that it is Pierre Poilievre.”
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