When protesting truckers rolled toward downtown Ottawa and proceeded to occupy the Canadian capital for four weeks, they got a welcome from a man waving to them from a highway overpass, his hands covered in knitted red mittens with white maple leaves on the palms.
The man was Pierre Poilievre, who would become the leader of the Conservative Party and who until just recently was widely referred to as Canada’s next prime minister. Soon he will have a new title: ex-Member of Parliament.
In a stunning upset, voters in Mr. Poilievre’s district (or riding, as it is known in Canada) turned him out of office on Monday. His embrace of the so-called Freedom Convoy of 2022, appears to have played a significant role in the defeat.
Voters in this part of Canada have memories of that time — and not fond ones.
With Ottawa paralyzed, local businesses forced to shut down and residents struggling to sleep amid the round-the-clock air horn blasting, Mr. Poilievre brought coffee and doughnuts to the truckers, who were protesting pandemic restrictions and the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On Tuesday, his support for the convoy, some leaders of which recently received criminal convictions, was a recurring complaint among voters in his district, Carleton.
“Populist politics is not for me,” declared one voter, Rick Pauloski, who said he had supported Conservatives in the past.
The trucker protest was not the only explanation Canadians offered for the candidate’s defeat.
Some said they did not trust Mr. Poilievre to deal effectively with President Trump’s trade war with Canada and his vows to annex it as the 51st state, given his echoing of the American president’s language. Mr. Poilievre, too, has condemned “radical woke ideology” and also promised to shrink government, cut foreign aid and in effect eliminate public broadcasting.
Others said they had grown tired of Mr. Poilievre’s style of attack politics, which he took to a level not previously seen in Canada. “Canada is broken,” he would tell voters — at least until Mr. Trump ’s threats set off a wave of Canadian patriotism. Some voters also said that as he rose to power, Mr. Poilievre neglected his local constituency.
Mr. Pauloski said he was put off by Mr. Poilievre’s embrace of vaccine opposition, which set off the truckers protest. “The fact that he has an anti-vaccine campaign really bothered me, because I’m a research scientist,” he said.
Even some who in the end voted for Mr. Poilievre said they had moments of doubt.
Ever since his first run for the Canadian Parliament in 2004, Megan Johnson, a lifelong Conservative, voted for him. But during the truckers’ siege of the capital, it began to feel like too much.
“After he went all in for the trucker convoy, I said: I’m never voting for him again,” Ms. Johnson recalled while out on a small tractor to do yard work on her seven-acre property. “It really ticked me off.”
Ultimately Ms. Johnson couldn’t bring herself to vote for the Liberal Party and planted a sign for Mr. Poilievre outside her home.
Voters in Canada do not cast ballots for the prime minister directly, only for local members of Parliament. And while the Liberals performed the best in this week’s elections, the Conservatives, notwithstanding Mr. Poilievre’s defeat, received their highest share of the popular vote since 1988, gaining seats in the House of Commons.
Mr. Poilievre’s loss came at the hands of a retired businessman and political novice running on the Liberal Party line named Bruce Fanjoy.
Mr. Fanjoy started campaigning in 2023, an unusually long lead time for anyone running for Canada’s Parliament. That year and the next the Liberals began a dramatic plummet in polls that eventually left them nearly 30 percent points behind Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives. Voters blamed Mr. Trudeau, the Liberal who stepped down as prime minister early this year, for inflation, interest rate increases and upwardly spiraling house prices.
“There were times in the past two years when I was canvassing and it felt like I had the wind in my face,” Mr. Fanjoy said. But after Mr. Trudeau stepped down and was replaced by Mark Carney, the former central banker of Canada and England, it got a lot easier.
In his district, there was little obvious sympathy on Tuesday for Mr. Poilievre.
In a shopping center parking lot in Manotick, one of the larger villages in the constituency, Marilyn Schacht noted that around town Mr. Poilievre “seemed to be well liked — until he wasn’t.”
She voted for him on Monday as did her husband, Ryan. Both said they thought that Mr. Poilievre’s style was what Canada needed during its current economic and political crisis.
“People were comparing him to Trump all the time, and the man you want to fight Trump should be a Trump-like guy,” Mr. Schacht said. “You want Churchill to fight against Hitler, you don’t want Chamberlain. I think we’ve got Chamberlain now.”
By Tuesday morning, Mr. Poilievre’s campaign office, on the top floor of a building with signs for a church and a martial arts school in downtown Manotick, had largely been emptied. A volunteer said that no one was available to comment before closing the door.
During his concession speech early Tuesday morning, Mr. Poilievre vowed to stay on as Conservative leader. The party’s caucus removed its two previous leaders following election losses. It is not clear if that will be the case for a third time.
There has been widespread speculation that a Conservative member in a safe seat in the party’s stronghold of Alberta will step down to allow Mr. Poilievre to return to the House of Commons through a special election.
Outside a restored mill in Manotick, Mr. Fanjoy acknowledged that the constituency has not suddenly joined the rest of Ottawa as Liberal territory.
“I discovered that while there’s a strong conservative tradition in Carleton, it wasn’t a Pierre Poilievre tradition,” he said.