Pierre Poilievre facing leadership review in January 2026!
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Summary
In this video, I discuss the likelihood of Pierre Polyev passing the leadership review vote at the Conservative Party of Canada's next national convention in 2026, and how the three major factions of the party are likely to vote in this leadership review.
Transcript
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Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. A couple days ago, the National Council of the Conservative Party of Canada
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announced the general date of the next national convention for the party, which will be in January 2026
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in my home city of Calgary. Now, there is an automatic leadership review triggered at this
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convention because the Conservative Party lost the last general election to the Liberals,
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and so Pierre Polyev is going to be undergoing a leadership review test at this convention,
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and in this video today, I want to go over what the likelihood of Pierre Polyev passing this vote is
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going to be, and what the different factions of the party are right now, and how they are probably
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going to be voting in this leadership review. But before I get into that, guys, I just want to remind
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you, if you like my coverage of Canadian politics, make sure to like this video, leave a comment on
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what you think is going to go down at this convention and leadership review vote, and then
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also subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber. Now, let's get into it. Right off the bat, I am
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going to say, as someone who generally really likes Pierre Polyev, I think he is probably, at least
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at the current state of how things are, going to pass the leadership review, probably at least more
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than 80%. At the same time, it is currently June. Many things can happen by January, and so the ground
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could be shaken up a lot by the time we get there, but I want to go through the three major factions
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I think are going to be participating in this leadership review vote and organizing people to
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show up to vote in favor of their interests. The first and most obvious group are people who like
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Pierre Polyev. I don't even want to say Pierre Polyev loyalists because there's a lot of good reasons
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to like him. It's not like Aaron O'Toole loyalists or maybe even Andrew Scheer loyalists. I didn't think
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Andrew Scheer was that bad of a leader, but Aaron O'Toole especially, the people who were showing up
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to cast ballots for him, although he never even made it to a leadership review, but the people who
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would have shown up for him are really there to protect their particular political faction who's
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currently in charge of the party or protect their jobs and things that are pretty shallow like that
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because I think we can all agree Aaron O'Toole was just a bad leader in general, so anyone who was
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going to show up and vote for the guy was not doing it for, I guess, what we could call pure
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reasons. It was mostly for backhanded reasons that they didn't like this other faction of the party
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or Aaron O'Toole was keeping them employed within the Conservative Party or in Parliament so they were
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going to come and vote for him. But Polyev genuinely has a lot of people who like him. Just look at social
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media. People still really like the guy. It doesn't matter that the Conservatives didn't win the last
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election or that he even lost his riding of Carlton. They don't really blame that on pure Polyev and
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neither do I blame pure Polyev specifically for the Conservative Party losing. So that's the obvious
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faction. I think it is going to be the largest faction. I think right now Polyev, again, could
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either maybe win 80% of the vote up to 95% of the vote like Danielle Smith almost did at the last UCP
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convention. Things are a little bit different when it comes to federal politics or even other provincial
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parties because while the United Conservative Party in Alberta lets basically anyone who is a member
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in good standing buy a delegate pass and show up and vote, in the Conservative Party of Canada and
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other parties around Canada, what happens is that there's only, I believe, 10 delegate slots per
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riding and then I believe the MP of the riding or the riding president also gets an automatic slot.
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But there's generally 10 votes per riding that could potentially show up to the
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convention. Not everyone always has time and sometimes riding delegations only send seven
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people or eight or sometimes only a few or they often show up with all 10, especially if those
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ridings are nearby where the convention is being held. And so that's where things can get a little
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bit more squirrely because the people who really like Polyev can't really organize to have everyone just
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buy tickets and show up. You have to be on a board and you have to show up to a board delegate election
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where you elect who's going to show up for your board. And so in theory, you could get more
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anti-Polyev people getting through because that board happens to have a culture that is more red
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Tory or something like that. So moving on from the yes Polyev people, I want to move on to one of the two
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no factions. One of them is like the hard no faction and then the other one is what I would describe as
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the soft no faction. Let's start with the hard no's. The hard no's are also what you could probably call
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the Doug Ford conservatives, the Corey Tanike conservatives, the conservatives who aren't
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really conservatives, the hyper-pragmatists who think Polyev was two to the right and so we need a
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pragmatic, effectively a liberal running the party in order to beat the liberals. I think these people
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are silly. I don't think that they actually have any merit behind what they're saying. They think
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that because Doug Ford wins elections in Ontario, we need a Doug Ford federally. No, you do not. Doug
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Ford sucks. Peer Polyev won a higher proportion of the vote in Ontario than Doug Ford did provincially.
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Now, provincial and federal politics are different and there are different dynamics happening on each
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level. But at the same time, that's what I would also answer these people back, that yeah, things are
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different provincially. Doug Ford is always running, as Jamil Giovanni says, against some of the worst
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opponents ever. Stephen Del Duca, you know, Andrew Horvath, Merit Stiles, Bonnie Crombie,
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Kathleen Wynne. These are people who are a threat to Doug Ford. These people are easy to beat, whereas
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Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney now are far more formidable liberals. They have more credibility in the
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public, whereas previously the liberals in Ontario and the NDP were running washed up, hyper sanctimonious
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progressives that Doug Ford could easily bat down, despite the fact that he doesn't do that good of
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a job as Ontario Premier. He operates almost like the liberals before him, but because he's in power
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and his opponents have like almost nothing to say against him because Doug Ford is doing what they
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would do, they end up basically getting stuck in the mud and they can't get any momentum behind them
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because they don't have anything to criticize Doug Ford over. It's not because there isn't things
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worth criticizing Ford over. I've told people, vote for the new blue party of Ontario because
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they're actually conservative, but the liberals in NDP don't really have a glove to lay on Doug
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because they'd be doing the same things because they all suck, frankly. So I reject this faction's
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criticisms of Pierre Polyev that he wasn't anti-Trump enough, that he was too conservative, that he
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shouldn't have been going after the CBC, that he shouldn't be trying to cut spending in government.
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We should actually be growing spending in government because that's what the people want.
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I don't think that's true at all. I think Canadians actually want conservatism. If anything,
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if I was to make a criticism of the 2025 campaign for the conservatives, it went too soft in many ways
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that we only were proposing to cut spending or cut taxes under $50,000 by 15%. That's great if you're
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only making $50,000 a year. Even that's not that great a cut because already, I believe the first
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$18,000 of your income are already tax exempt. So you're only reducing 15% of taxes on the first,
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what is it, $32,000 of tax or of income. We should have been offering 15% across the board,
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including corporate taxes. We should have been reducing immigration, 100,000 PRs per year,
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100,000 temporary foreign workers and 100,000 students. That's it. No extensions on TFW,
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what is it? Not applications, but permits. If you're a temporary foreign worker, you are temporary.
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You don't get to extend it past the time that we gave you, and then you can't reapply for another
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year or two. That would be a really good way of making sure that the country doesn't become overrun
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with cheap labor from countries where people frankly don't have any standards. So when they show up to
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this country and they're blowing 90% of their income on food taxes and rent, they'll put up with
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it when a Canadian obviously wouldn't put up with that because that's insane. But these people come
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from somewhere where that's fine because it's better than where they used to be. So you're competing
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against someone that you're not on a level playing field with. So that's the Doug Ford
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conservatives. They're going to vote no because they're not conservative. They're hyper pragmatic.
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You're going to get a lot of them coming from places like Quebec, Toronto, metro urban areas
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who believe that the secret sauce is doing less, being more pragmatic, more like the liberals.
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And now let's move on to the third faction who I'm considering the soft nose who are people who
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probably like Pierre Polyev, but they don't like the HQ of the party. They didn't like how the
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nominations were conducted. They didn't like how the appointments were made before the election.
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They didn't like how flat footed the conservative party was when the swap happened with Justin Trudeau.
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And it is kind of insane that before the election, there were 90 seats. There were 90 ridings in the
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country that didn't have a candidate. At the same time, the conservatives were demanding an election.
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That is what I consider gross negligence. And I can see I'm kind of like halfway between the yes Polyev
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and the soft no Polyev factions in the sense I like Polyev, but I want HQ cleaned up. Frankly,
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Jenny Byrne needs to be fired yesterday. A lot of other people in HQ need to be fired yesterday.
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People who have been counseling risk aversion, people saying, oh, don't say this, don't do this.
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There was, I've literally heard that there was a ban on candidates leaving their own ridings to go
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help out in other ridings. There was a ban on candidates going to public events or debates or
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meeting with community leaders unless it was signed off first by the party. And when I say that they
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were locked in their own ridings, I mean, guys who were in safe ridings were not allowed to leave
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that riding to go campaign elsewhere. Maybe that's not entirely true, but that's what I've heard from
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people who are very experienced organizers, that guys who were saying, I'm going to win my riding
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by 70%. Let me go to Edmonton. I'm going to ride, win my riding with 60% of the vote. Let me go
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to the GTA area. And they weren't allowed to do it. And so what I would love to see in the party is
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Polyev stays and a lot of the HQ goes. And I'm pretty sure that that is eventually going to happen
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here. So I see a lot of the soft no poly of people saying, unless Polyev fixes this, I'm a no,
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I think he is probably going to end up fixing a lot of these things. Because even from his own
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political perspective of wanting to become prime minister, not in a selfish way, but obviously,
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if you're the leader of a party, you want to become prime minister and make the changes that
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you want to make. And I think that if he is properly self-interested in wanting to get stuff done
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and win, he's going to have to leave behind, frankly, the losers whose entire political
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campaign experience is losing close elections, losing elections that were winnable. And I have
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this problem with parties all around Canada. There are so many people in the campaign business who I
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say they're not campaign managers. They are risk managers. They go around telling you what you
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shouldn't do. What can you say that's not going to attract any attention? And I always look at these
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people and think campaigns are the business of getting attention. You need to get attention on
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yourself so you can say what you want to do. Sometimes you have to be a little controversial
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so people say, well, what's that guy all about? And then you can say, well, by the way, I want to
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cut taxes by 20% across the board. And people are like, well, that sounds good. But if you just say
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placid, boring things, what's the point of looking at you? And I think at times in the election,
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even though Polyev is a very, you know, rightfully gets a lot of attention, and he's a very charismatic
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person, I felt like the people who were advising him on what to say were advising him to be boring
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at times. Because people were saying, after you listen to like the first stump speech he gave during
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the campaign, you've heard them all. Because his team was saying, don't say this, don't do that,
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don't talk about that. And so he kind of stuck to those safer elements of his campaign that he's
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talked about over time. And because Carney, whether it was dishonest or not, and it was dishonest because
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he believes in carbon tax, when he got rid of the carbon tax, it did take a major plank away from the
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conservative campaign that they really couldn't talk about anymore. And nobody seemed to want to
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replace it. And that's a problem. And the thing is that leaders only have so much time to make
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decisions during the campaign. So if their campaign manager, if the national director is going to start
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saying, only say this, only do this, the leader doesn't really have time to take five days off
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the campaign trail to say, hey, hey, hey, guys, reset. Why are we doing this soft, tabulum nonsense,
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where we just sound like liberals, like light liberals? We should be talking about slashing taxes
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and slashing immigration. They're like, no, no, no, we might tick off certain interest groups.
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It was ridiculous. And I would say the biggest thing that needs to be fixed
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is nominations. If you are skewing nominations to nominate candidates who are objectively not the
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best at campaigning because they couldn't have won the nomination on their own, you are going to start
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dropping a lot of the ridings in the general election. And we saw that. In fact, we saw Hindu
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voters, Hindu-Canadian voters, who, by the way, are the second most likely religious group to vote
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conservative after evangelical Protestant Christians. They stopped showing up for the conservatives because
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pretty much in certain areas like Brampton and Mississauga, almost every single Hindu candidate
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was just disqualified from the nominations, whereas no seat candidate was really kicked out.
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And, you know, eventually, Hindu people are not hyper-collectivist where they require a Hindu
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candidate to be on the ballot for them to show up. They usually don't care. I know tons of Hindu people.
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They took this personally, and I would say somewhat rightfully so, when literally like a dozen Hindu
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candidates in your region just get whacked for no reason and nobody can say why, yeah, you're going to
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cause a lot of the community not to show up. And whoever was making these nomination decisions,
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that person should be fired. That person should be potentially prosecuted for basically gross
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negligence and basically wasting the party's money and time nominating people that were the lesser
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candidates. This is what happens when you nominate and appoint people who couldn't have won a nomination
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on their own, and they either needed help from the party HQ or they needed their opponents
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disqualified. You are nominating people who are bad candidates. It's just that simple. I was kicked
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out of Calgary Signal Hills nomination, and the guy that certain people in the party wanted to win
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couldn't even win the nomination still because I told my people to vote down ballot against that
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person. Then that person, after they still lost Calgary Signal Hills nomination, was then thrown into
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the Calgary Confederation nomination. They were just appointed to it the day after the election was called,
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and that person still lost that riding. And it's like, maybe it's because they're not very good at
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this, and you shouldn't kick people out like me and others who actually are good at campaigning and
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good at messaging to the public. But whatever. So going forward to January, I think Polly is probably
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going to pull it out. If I'm making a prediction of what he's going to get in a leadership review,
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I would say it's probably going to be 88% to 92% in that range if he does the right things. If
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people start sticking around HQ, if there's no changes made, if the party kind of goes a little
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bit too soft on certain policy issues, I could see people getting restless and starting to say,
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well, can we get something better? I still feel like he would pass, but if it gets closer,
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it's going to wound him as leader. And I really don't want to see that happen because I'm looking
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around, and Polly was already pretty, like, really good as a leader. I don't even see anyone around who
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could replace him. So this is the tightrope I'm in. I want changes made in HQ, but I also really want
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peer polio to stick around. But anyways, that's just my thoughts. Give me your thoughts in the
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comment section below. Subscribe if you're not a subscriber, like the video, and I will see you