Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and 213 others vying for a seat in the House of Commons will be in the spotlight Monday, as voters in a rural Alberta riding head to the polls.

Two political science professors say Poilievre is expected to handily win the byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot, a sprawling eastern Alberta riding stretching from Edmonton to Calgary. The riding and its previous incarnations have been a Tory stronghold for a century.

They say the only question is: by how much?

“In every election from 2004 to 2025, the vote share garnered by the Conservatives’ winning candidate has been at least 80 per cent,” said Julie Simmons with the University of Guelph in Ontario.

The one exception was in 2021, when Conservative incumbent Damien Kurek got 71 per cent of the vote, largely due to the right-wing People’s Party of Canada eating up some of his votes, Simmons said.

“This is just certainly an exceptionally strong riding for the Conservative Party,” she said.

Lori Williams, a political science professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said Poilievre needs to not only win the riding but do it “decisively,” so electors can trust he’ll be a good Opposition leader and pass his January leadership review.

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“He absolutely needs to sail over this hurdle,” she said.

“But if he clears this one, he’s then got to clear the, ‘How am I going to be an effective Opposition leader in this climate? How can I be pro-Canadian and critical of the government?’”

The byelection was called in June after Kurek, who won the seat again in the April general election with 83 per cent of votes, stepped down to allow Poilievre to run.

Poilievre lost his long-held Ottawa-area seat to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy.

Simmons said if Poilievre sees less than the average percentage of votes Conservatives have received in the last few elections, it could be because of vocal challengers like Independent candidate Bonnie Critchley.

The military veteran has described Poilievre as a parachute candidate who only wants to represent the riding to progress his political career.

Poilievre was born and raised in Calgary but has lived in Ottawa for the last two decades.

A majority of the candidates on the ballot are part of the Longest Ballot Committee, a protest group calling for various changes to Canada’s election system. They could also put a dent in Poilievre’s vote share, Simmons said.

“For some people, this might be a protest vote against the Conservative Party,” she said.

Other candidates include Darcy Spady, from the energy sector, for the Liberals. The NDP’s Katherine Swampy is a former band councillor for Samson Cree Nation.

Also running for the seat is Libertarian Party candidate Michael Harris, who wants to win so a referendum over whether Alberta should separate from the rest of Canada can make headway.

Thick coil-bound, 32-page laminated booklets listing the record 214 candidates are to be available at voting stations.

Elections Canada has said, for the first time ever in Canadian history, it’s using a blank ballot because there are too many candidates to put on the piece of paper.

Voters won’t be marking a box with an X. Instead, they must hand write the name of their preferred candidate in a blank space.

If a voter misspells a candidate’s name, Elections Canada said it will still be counted.

More than 14,000 people out of almost 86,000 registered voters cast votes in advance polls.

A spokesperson for Poilievre’s campaign has said the party leader plans to be in Camrose, the riding’s largest municipality, on Monday

Elections Canada said counting on election night is expected to take longer than usual.

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