Mark Slapinski - January 26, 2026


CTV Makes SHOCKING CONFESSION About Poilievre


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

184.47426

Word Count

2,172

Sentence Count

111

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

Pierre Polyev faces the biggest test yet to his leadership this week, as Conservative Party of Canada members vote Friday on whether he stays or goes as leader. How will he fare at the party's convention in Calgary on Friday? We speak with Shachi Krill, President of the Angus Reid Institute, and Abacus Data CEO David Colletto to try and answer that question.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 If there was a single doubt in your mind that Polyev would ace his leadership review
00:00:03.280 and become the next Prime Minister of Canada, you simply have not been paying attention.
00:00:08.240 But don't take it from me. Take it from the fine folks at CTV.
00:00:12.020 He's set to face the biggest test yet to his leadership this week.
00:00:15.960 Party members will decide on Friday whether Polyev stays or goes as leader.
00:00:20.840 How will he fare at the convention vote in Calgary?
00:00:23.420 I spoke with Shachi Krill, President of the Angus Reid Institute
00:00:26.420 and Abacus Data CEO David Colletto a little earlier.
00:00:30.680 Hi, Shachi. Hi, David. Thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate you making the time.
00:00:35.260 Hey there.
00:00:36.280 Shachi, I'll start with you.
00:00:37.360 Before we get into the sort of mechanics of the party itself and conservative supporters,
00:00:42.300 top-line numbers, what are you seeing in the electorate right now
00:00:45.420 for the conservatives versus the liberals and Polyev versus Carney?
00:00:50.300 So right now, I mean, the conservatives, and we'll have new numbers early next week,
00:00:55.120 but they are holding their own within a couple of points of the liberals.
00:01:00.000 Sometimes a statistical tie.
00:01:01.860 So, you know, when we talk about the challenges for Pierre Polyev, you know, certainly conservatives
00:01:08.120 will push back and point out, well, if we were doing so badly, you know, why are we in very
00:01:14.080 good competitive situation with the liberals?
00:01:17.620 But that doesn't account for the fact that it's still not enough mathematically in terms of
00:01:24.180 percentage of popular vote or the number of seats they return to parliament to be in a position to
00:01:29.560 form a majority and that anybody but conservative sentiment continues to prevail.
00:01:36.120 In the era of Donald Trump, you will find block voters, NDP voters, even green voters who may hold their noses
00:01:42.980 and vote for the liberals because the narrative or the perception of Polyev, you know, sort of being
00:01:49.900 too close to that right-wing side of politics, too close to Trumpian politics, has been just absolutely toxic for him.
00:01:57.980 It's been kryptonite.
00:01:58.840 The lady in the video is saying the same thing that I've been saying for a while.
00:02:02.920 Liberals and conservatives are still tied right now, which is great.
00:02:06.180 And that's with Donald Trump in the picture.
00:02:08.400 The second that Donald Trump gets out of the picture, gets out of voters' minds, that's when the liberals are going to go down in the polls
00:02:14.740 and the conservative party is going to go up and up.
00:02:17.920 Donald Trump obviously won't be around forever.
00:02:19.860 And considering how bad his polling numbers are right now, there's a good chance he could lose the midterms.
00:02:25.360 The faster that Trump gets out of office, the faster we can get Polyev in office.
00:02:29.780 And you also start to see, Vashi, some wobbles and some doubts among past conservative voters.
00:02:36.720 So when we talk to people who voted conservative just about a year ago in that 2025 spring election,
00:02:43.980 only about 60% of those voters, an important distinction, those aren't paid up conservative party members.
00:02:49.700 They're people who voted, who now say only about 58%, 60% basically say Polyev should stay.
00:02:57.500 About a quarter of them think he should go.
00:02:59.760 So that is the concern, you know, in terms of the broad electorate.
00:03:04.680 What the party thinks of him, what his true faithful grassroots members think of him, obviously another story.
00:03:10.820 And David, you've done a deep dive into those numbers as well.
00:03:13.620 How would you explain sort of the different factions that make up a Polyev supporter base?
00:03:21.240 Yeah, well, I think if you look at what we call the conservative base, right,
00:03:25.360 those would be people who say, I'm not going to vote for any other party.
00:03:28.300 It's conservative or nothing.
00:03:29.940 They represent about one in four Canadians.
00:03:31.820 So it's a substantial number that make up its base.
00:03:34.920 It's always had that.
00:03:35.700 It's always had the advantage of a really high floor, and it's larger than the Liberals or the New Democrats or any other party.
00:03:42.960 But the problem is, as Sashi just highlighted, the ceiling is also quite low.
00:03:50.520 But if you look at those who are in that base, not only do they really like Pierre Polyev.
00:03:56.320 In fact, they tell us they trust him far more than they do even Stephen Harper or Doug Ford or Danielle Smith.
00:04:03.500 But they actually think overwhelmingly that he makes the party more electable, right?
00:04:08.280 And so that's, I think, a really important point about his relationship with that base.
00:04:13.300 They agree with him in not just his tone.
00:04:16.840 They want more confrontation.
00:04:18.560 They think the system is rigged against them.
00:04:21.100 They think, you know, the media is not reporting anything fairly.
00:04:24.800 They have deep suspicions around a lot of public institutions.
00:04:28.760 And yet, almost every other Canadian disagrees with that perspective.
00:04:32.360 And that's the paradox facing Polyev's leadership, in that at once he is likely going to do very, very well next weekend.
00:04:40.060 But at the same time, the more that people learn that, the more they might be off-putting for the exact reason that Sashi said at the beginning around the connection with Trump.
00:04:49.540 There's this weird thing sometimes in politics, and the three of us have talked about this before,
00:04:53.260 but, Sashi, where something feels really inevitable or really certain, and then all of a sudden it isn't.
00:04:59.680 And I've covered lots of stuff like that.
00:05:01.480 And I feel like it's almost impossible for Mr. Polyev not to do well in this leadership review,
00:05:08.720 given the support, as David mentions, he does have among the base of the party.
00:05:12.940 Is there a world in which that's not going to happen?
00:05:15.760 Like, what do you think is going to happen?
00:05:17.380 My God, it would be breathtaking, right?
00:05:20.400 Like, it would be a jaw-dropping moment if we didn't see what the political class,
00:05:27.560 or however we want to describe ourselves, view as him not receiving a threshold high enough to continue.
00:05:35.320 Because we have to remember, this is, as David's pointed out, Polyev's party.
00:05:40.760 The guy won the leadership with, what, like 90% of the vote?
00:05:45.000 So you would have to see a tremendous amount of defection from, you know,
00:05:50.480 a near-unanimous endorsement from him when he took the leadership.
00:05:54.520 And when we've asked conservatives in the past to kind of debrief and reflect on what went wrong in the last election,
00:06:01.960 you know, who do you blame?
00:06:03.600 Conservative voters at that time, and those diehards that David was talking about,
00:06:07.780 but even those who cast a, let's call it a warm or a friendly vote, if not, if not, you know,
00:06:13.340 until a death to us part loyalty vote, they didn't blame Polyev.
00:06:18.380 They blamed Trump.
00:06:20.420 They blamed Carney.
00:06:22.280 They blamed circumstances.
00:06:24.520 But they didn't blame the leader's approach in that last campaign, which arguably cost him the election.
00:06:31.500 So to see a level of defection that really calls his leadership into question, I do think would be, you know,
00:06:38.800 we can all doubt ourselves and, you know, talk to me in the wee hours, I guess, over the weekend morning to find out where things are at.
00:06:46.360 But it would be, I think, a really gobsmacking moment if he didn't have it.
00:06:51.380 The other piece of it is at least publicly, and yes, there have been floor crossings, and yes, there have been sort of voce grumblings about, you know,
00:07:00.660 from within conservative ranks, but you don't right now see an alternative.
00:07:05.620 And I find that, you know, for people to defect or to go somewhere else, it's not just should Polyev stay or go, it's what's my alternative.
00:07:15.120 And that alternative piece, you're not seeing or hearing within the ranks of the party or the caucus.
00:07:19.680 It feels like a very unique situation, David, in that, and I could be misinterpreting this,
00:07:24.360 but in that, like, I do feel as though Mr. Polyev's leadership of the party has taken the base
00:07:29.840 and the size of the scope of the level of support for the party to do heights.
00:07:34.280 At the same time, among the rest of the electorate, it does feel like that same leadership,
00:07:41.000 that is such a benefit to the party in some ways, is a real detriment in others.
00:07:44.340 It is, and let's be clear.
00:07:47.640 Historically, that's been a problem for conservative, particularly at the national level, conservative leaders, right,
00:07:52.260 who have always had a difficult time expanding beyond a certain number.
00:07:56.680 Even Stephen Harper did.
00:07:57.820 There was, you know, he hit 41, and he could not break past that when he won his majority.
00:08:02.420 The problem is that in the current context, where we have more or less a two-and-a-half-party system
00:08:09.760 with the bloc in Quebec, but really two parties outside of it, means that's not enough.
00:08:15.660 It's not enough to have assembled a coalition that's larger, maybe, than you've ever been able to do,
00:08:20.680 as long as, one, you've got a stronger liberal party,
00:08:23.520 and two, that Polyev is so off-putting to so many more people
00:08:28.420 that you may be inclined to vote NDP or green or bloc, but you're going to actually say,
00:08:32.720 you know what, no way, I'm going to go and vote liberal just to stop this guy.
00:08:36.380 And so that is the, that's the fundamental problem.
00:08:39.440 And I agree, I'm not sure there's someone who at once can both speak to the base of the party
00:08:45.060 and also grow it, right?
00:08:47.040 I don't believe that if Jean Charest was leader of the Conservative Party today,
00:08:51.180 that one, they would have won the last election,
00:08:53.680 or two, that they'd be in any stronger position,
00:08:55.800 because about a quarter of the Conservative base would look at Mr. Charest and say,
00:09:00.080 you're the exact problem that I want to see blown up and seen broken down and seen changed.
00:09:05.580 And so this is, this is the challenge that, that, that I think is not going to go away
00:09:11.620 if you replace Pierre Polyev.
00:09:13.100 It's going to continue because of the, what I call the opinion architecture
00:09:17.040 of the Conservative movement in Canada right now.
00:09:19.780 So let's summarize this, and I'll give you my interpretation of what they just said.
00:09:23.580 Polyev is going to ace his leadership review, and even CTV acknowledges it.
00:09:28.080 There is nobody else that's qualified to lead the Conservative Party,
00:09:31.840 and at least in my opinion, there's nobody else qualified to become the next Prime Minister of Canada.
00:09:36.880 That role belongs to Polyev and nobody else.
00:09:39.800 Now, when the mainstream media, which is obviously very biased against Polyev,
00:09:44.040 says good things, or things that are sort of in the middle,
00:09:47.760 that's a great sign, and that means Polyev is doing really well.
00:09:51.420 And I'll be the first to admit that politics is complicated, it's tricky,
00:09:55.420 and there's not a clear path to Polyev winning the next election.
00:09:58.860 However, he's got a new campaign manager, he has a new team,
00:10:02.620 and I think he's smart enough to approach the next election
00:10:05.120 a little bit differently than he approached the last election.
00:10:07.900 He did a great job last election, and he got some good numbers,
00:10:11.800 but unfortunately, he didn't win.
00:10:13.780 When you look at polling, the Conservatives lead in so many areas.
00:10:17.420 Canadians trust Conservatives when it comes to the economy and the cost of living.
00:10:21.860 So, on those issues, normal Canadians, they have a lot of faith in Polyev.
00:10:26.540 The only wild card right now, perhaps ironically, is the United States President.
00:10:30.880 Whenever the United States President starts acting up,
00:10:33.720 saying silly things like he wants to take over Greenland,
00:10:36.380 that pushes people away from the Conservative Party and into the arms of people like Carney.
00:10:41.480 So, a big part of the next election will be whether or not Trump decides to
00:10:45.580 stop saying stuff like that, or whether he keeps acting up.
00:10:49.420 Conservatives win on a lot of issues.
00:10:51.320 Canadians trust Polyev when it comes to the economy, cost of living.
00:10:55.260 The only thing the Liberals really dominate in is with Trump.
00:10:58.460 Now, if Trump just keeps his mouth shut, the Conservatives should do fine.
00:11:02.180 But whenever Trump starts saying silly things like he wants to annex Greenland,
00:11:07.120 all that does is push people away from people like Polyev and push them into the arms of people
00:11:11.700 like Carney.
00:11:12.700 And I hope people understand that.
00:11:14.120 Obviously, Canada and America are better off as allies.
00:11:17.320 And I think both Canada and America would have been better off if Polyev was in office,
00:11:22.060 and both Trump and Polyev work together.
00:11:24.600 But for whatever reason, Trump doesn't seem to understand that.
00:11:27.940 And I don't understand why he does what he does, but it's definitely not good for our
00:11:32.280 country, specifically Conservatives.
00:11:34.300 That being said, I'm still optimistic.
00:11:36.120 I'm still optimistic.
00:11:37.500 There's still a path to victory, however tricky it is.
00:11:40.680 And we're going to win, and we're going to win big.
00:11:42.920 So, thanks for tuning in.
00:11:44.240 I love you all.
00:11:45.240 Talk to you tomorrow, Patriots.