FIRST READING: Are Poilievre’s rallies breaking records? Almost

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. TOP STORY As Liberals denounce the massive rallies following the Conservative campaign as being too Trump-like, Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre is yet to break attendance records set by the Liberals themselves more than 50 years ago. On Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people turned up in the Edmonton area for a Canada First rally featuring Poilievre and former prime minister Stephen Harper. The gathering crashed local cell phone networks, and was both the largest of the 2025 campaign and the largest in the 22-year history of the modern Conservative Party. The Liberals have accused Poilievre’s rallies of being Trumpian in nature. On April 5, the official Liberal Party X account uploaded video of Poilievre talking about crowd sizes, and contrasting it with similar statements by U.S. President Donald Trump. “Poilievre is obsessed with crowd sizes. Who does that remind you of?” the post says. But long before Poilievre was drawing large crowds, a Liberal leader was doing the same. If Poilievre wants to break the all-time national attendance record for an indoor partisan political rally, he still has a few thousand attendees to go until he can breach a benchmark set by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1979. It was an election that Trudeau would ultimately lose to then Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark. But on May 22, Trudeau capped off the campaign with an overflow rally of 18,000 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, then one of the largest indoor venues in the country.

• Liberal candidate compares Poilievre rallies to ‘protests’ akin to Freedom Convoy
• With Trudeau gone, it's like 'night and day' in a former Toronto Liberal fortress that turned Tory blue

Crowd sizes are notoriously difficult to estimate — particularly in an era before drones or digital photography — but the numbers for the 1979 rally are reliable given that Maple Leaf Gardens had a known seating capacity (16,000 for hockey, 18,000 for concerts). And that wasn’t all that unusual for Trudeau, whose 15 years as prime minister featured several unusually large partisan gatherings. In Trudeau’s first election, in 1968, a crowd of between 25,000 and 40,000 gathered to see him in Montreal’s Place Ville Marie in an event that made headlines as “another huge Trudeau crowd.” The 1968 campaign would also see convened a crowd estimated at 45,000 in Toronto’s Civic Square, which was reported as “the largest political rally ever in this country.” Canadian political culture has not traditionally featured all that many mass rallies, in part because it’s often too cold to host them outside and there are limited options for indoor events. To this day, Canada is home to only a handful of indoor venues with seating capacities of more than 20,000. In 1957, then Progressive Conservative leader John Diefenbaker led what has been described by historians as a “perfect” campaign. The election — which ended in a record-breaking landslide for the Progressive Conservatives — was defined by overwhelming crushes of people intercepting Diefenbaker in hotel lobbies or at train stations. But given the limited venue options in 1950s Canada, the Diefenbaker campaign was never able to host a single gathering of more than a few thousand. The “crescendo” of the 1957 campaign, according to reporters at the time, was when 6,000 people crammed into Vancouver’s Georgia Auditorium. “I didn’t think Canadians could get so het up about politics,” said one attendee quoted in the Vancouver Sun. Poilievre’s rallies, notably, have often been convened in industrial venues configured to hold standing crowds. That was the case on Monday, where the rally was held at an empty warehouse near the Edmonton International Airport. The day prior, Poilievre had appeared at a warehouse in Penticton, B.C., before a crowd estimated at 3,000 by the Penticton Herald — a number equivalent to roughly one tenth of the city’s population. When it comes to generalized political rallies, meanwhile, the record easily belongs to the 1995 “unity rally” convened in Montreal to convince Quebecers to vote “No” in that year’s secession referendum. The oft-repeated estimate is that 100,000 people attended, including thousands who bused in from neighbouring provinces. And the Canadian record for the largest one-day ticketed gathering of any kind still belongs to 2003, when the SARSstock rock concert attracted as many as 500,000 attendees to Toronto’s Downsview Park.   LAST RIDE OF THE GIGANTO BALLOTS In Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s home riding of Carleton, this election will once again feature absurdly long ballots, similar to the ones used in a June by-election in Toronto-St. Paul’s. It’s the work of the Longest Ballot Committee, an activist group that discovered there’s no real material barrier to running dozens of independent candidates in a single riding. This whole thing might also be the work of communists. The Longest Ballot Committee has multiple featured pages  on the Communist Party of Canada’s official website.

CONSERVATIVE ENDORSES CONSERVATIVE Former prime minister Stephen Harper officially endorsed the Conservatives on Monday night. While it’s not all that unusual for a Conservative to endorse Conservatives, Harper has sat out the last two federal elections. Harper’s full endorsement speech  is here , but the line everyone seems to be mentioning is when Harper said that both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney used to work for him (Poilievre was a Conservative backbencher, Carney was appointed governor of the Bank of Canada by Harper). Said the ex prime minister, “in that regard, my choice, without hesitation, without equivocation, without a shadow of a doubt is Pierre Poilievre.” Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.