There's some activism group that wants electoral reform to a Single Transferable Vote or Mixed Member Proportional system instead of the First Past the Post (ya know, the exact same thing Trudeau campaigned on in 2015 - "This will be the last FPTP election" then immediately abandoned when he realized the traditional system benefits his party more).

So they have a whole bunch of randos without an affiliation run as independents but not campaign in targeted ridings. They did the same thing in the Ontario provincial election just a few months earlier.

Supposedly they targeted Poilievre's riding of Carleton (an Ottawa suburb) to make it high profile, even though PP has no say whatsoever in electoral reform.

There's also some conspiracy stuff, as Elections Canada announced they were going to start pre-counting the advanced poll votes in Poilievre's riding before election day because it was going to take poll workers longer than usual to unfold and tabulate the irregular folded ballots.

This, along with the fact that Carney's government-funded agitprop media started telegraphing a week before the election that Poilievre's seat was in danger of flipping Red when he had held it since 2004. Voter turnout in his riding was also apparently sus, given something like 80k people voter for either of the two main parties in a riding with only a pop of 120k including children.

Apparently with the activist 90 randos on the ballot, many don't even live in the riding.

This strategy seems to be borne of a Supreme Court decision that struck down registration fees that were designed to discourage unserious candidates. Apparently only 50 signatures are needed to run, so the activist group gathers the same 50 people to sign 80+ nomination forms, gumming up the whole ballot.

Most ballots only had 4-6 names while the seat for the conservative leader somehow had 90 candidates.

I worked the elections this year. My city riding had 6 candidates- CPC, Lib, NDP, PPC, Green & 1 independent (who got 0 votes at my station).