Allan Levine is a historian and the author of King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny. His next book, The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War, will be published in October.

Going into the 1921 federal election, Arthur Meighen was feeling mildly confident. Nearly 17 months earlier, the Conservative leader had succeeded Sir Robert Borden, who had led the Unionist government – a coalition of Conservatives and some English-speaking Liberals – during the First World War. Nearly all the Unionist Liberals had returned to their own party, led by William Lyon Mackenzie King.

But Meighen was in far more trouble than he was willing to admit. He was detested in Quebec for being the architect of conscription and hated in the West for his unwavering support of the protective tariff.

King’s Liberals won the slimmest of majority governments with 118 of 235 seats. For the first time in a Canadian federal election, the Conservatives fell from first to third, winning only 50 seats. More surprising was that the Progressive Party, a loose political association formed in 1919 by farmers who had lost patience with both traditional parties, combined with farmers’ parties from Ontario and Alberta to win a total of 62 seats.

Like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who recently lost his Ottawa-area seat in Carleton, Meighen was defeated in Manitoba’s Portage la Prairie by his Progressive opponent by 177 votes. He was “not very greatly surprised by the downfall of his regime,” writes Roger Graham, Meighen’s biographer, but he was “sorely disappointed by the humiliating decisiveness of its rejection at the polls.”

Still, there are always second chances in Canadian politics. Meighen did contemplate resigning, but decided against it: “A man is not much good, who after a period of unbroken success, cannot stand one reverse, however sharp and decisive,” Meighen wrote to a friend.

In quick order, and before King was officially prime minister, a newly elected Conservative MP in the eastern Ontario riding of Grenville accepted a low-level civil-service job and resigned his seat. Much to King’s dismay, Meighen easily won the by-election by 1,662 votes over his lone opponent from the Progressive Party. When the internally divided Progressives made clear that they had no desire to serve as the Official Opposition, Grenville’s new MP was asked to serve as Opposition Leader.

Three years later, the tables were turned. In the 1925 federal election, King’s Liberals came in second place with 99 of 245 seats, while Meighen’s Conservatives won 116. Meighen assumed he would form a minority government, but King, as was his right, refused to relinquish power because he knew that the Progressives, who won 24 seats, would rather have him in power. And King was proven right – much to Meighen’s incredulity.

But like Meighen in 1921, King lost his seat in the Southern Ontario riding of York North by 494 votes to Conservative Thomas Lennox. King later wrote of “feeling regret” at losing his seat, and he rationalized his loss to Mr. Lennox as being the result of “what money and whiskey can do.” Still, he was confident he would find and win in another riding in the near future – which he did early in 1926 in a by-election in Prince Albert, Sask. He appointed Charles McDonald, the Liberal MP who had won the riding, to the Senate.

A similar avenue is now open to Mr. Poilievre. Damien Kurek, a Conservative MP for the Alberta riding of Battle River‐Crowfoot since 2019, has decided to put the needs of the party leader ahead of his own by offering to resign. Winning there should not be a problem: Mr. Kurek got 46,000 more votes than the second-place Liberal candidate. And though the Prime Minister could take up to six months to call the by-election, Mark Carney has said he will do so “as soon as possible.”

The other important factor, for leaders in this chastened purgatory, is to understand why you lost in the first place and alter your future strategy. Neither King nor Meighen did much soul-searching and carried on, however. Both blamed a myriad of factors for their respective electoral losses – except themselves. That approach mostly turned out better for King, though, because he innately understood that in Canadian politics, extreme and inflexible policies will never sustain long-term victory at the polls. King survived the debacle of 1925, a customs scandal and his famous constitutional fight with governor-general Byng, and went on to reign for many more years.

However, in the 1945 election – King’s last – he lost his seat in Prince Albert to the CCF by 159 votes. He easily won a by-election two months later in the Ontario riding of Glengarry, though he found the experience disappointing and somewhat humiliating.

Meighen, on the other hand, was not flexible, especially on his unyielding faith in the pre-eminence of the British Empire and his sacred but alienating economic policies. He lost his seat again in the 1926 federal election, and after that resigned as Conservative leader. He returned as leader during the Second World War, but a 1942 by-election loss in the Toronto-area constituency of York South ended his political career.

Given Mr. Poilievre’s supreme confidence and brash style, and the fact that his Conservatives won 20 more seats than they did in 2019, he seems far more likely to be a Meighen than a King. He, too, does not appear to grasp King’s basic political tenet: That “in a country like ours it is particularly true that the art of government is largely one of seeking to reconcile rather than to exaggerate differences – to come as near as may be possible to the happy mean.” Mr. Poilievre’s attack-dog shtick is sure to continue.

Mr. Meighen titled his 1949 collection of speeches and essays Unrevised and Unrepented. That title might work as well for Mr. Poilievre’s memoir, too, should he ever write it.