The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Pierre Poilievre facing leadership review in January 2026!

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. A couple days ago, the National Council of the Conservative Party of Canada

00:00:06.980 announced the general date of the next national convention for the party, which will be in January 2026

00:00:14.660 in my home city of Calgary. Now, there is an automatic leadership review triggered at this

00:00:21.580 convention because the Conservative Party lost the last general election to the Liberals,

00:00:26.940 and so Pierre Polyev is going to be undergoing a leadership review test at this convention,

00:00:33.720 and in this video today, I want to go over what the likelihood of Pierre Polyev passing this vote is

00:00:39.340 going to be, and what the different factions of the party are right now, and how they are probably

00:00:45.160 going to be voting in this leadership review. But before I get into that, guys, I just want to remind

00:00:50.540 you, if you like my coverage of Canadian politics, make sure to like this video, leave a comment on

00:00:56.420 what you think is going to go down at this convention and leadership review vote, and then

00:01:00.940 also subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber. Now, let's get into it. Right off the bat, I am

00:01:06.880 going to say, as someone who generally really likes Pierre Polyev, I think he is probably, at least

00:01:11.740 at the current state of how things are, going to pass the leadership review, probably at least more

00:01:17.500 than 80%. At the same time, it is currently June. Many things can happen by January, and so the ground

00:01:25.480 could be shaken up a lot by the time we get there, but I want to go through the three major factions

00:01:31.740 I think are going to be participating in this leadership review vote and organizing people to

00:01:36.760 show up to vote in favor of their interests. The first and most obvious group are people who like

00:01:42.420 Pierre Polyev. I don't even want to say Pierre Polyev loyalists because there's a lot of good reasons

00:01:46.500 to like him. It's not like Aaron O'Toole loyalists or maybe even Andrew Scheer loyalists. I didn't think

00:01:51.940 Andrew Scheer was that bad of a leader, but Aaron O'Toole especially, the people who were showing up

00:01:56.800 to cast ballots for him, although he never even made it to a leadership review, but the people who

00:02:01.340 would have shown up for him are really there to protect their particular political faction who's

00:02:06.660 currently in charge of the party or protect their jobs and things that are pretty shallow like that

00:02:11.820 because I think we can all agree Aaron O'Toole was just a bad leader in general, so anyone who was

00:02:18.360 going to show up and vote for the guy was not doing it for, I guess, what we could call pure

00:02:22.800 reasons. It was mostly for backhanded reasons that they didn't like this other faction of the party

00:02:28.180 or Aaron O'Toole was keeping them employed within the Conservative Party or in Parliament so they were

00:02:33.720 going to come and vote for him. But Polyev genuinely has a lot of people who like him. Just look at social

00:02:38.640 media. People still really like the guy. It doesn't matter that the Conservatives didn't win the last

00:02:43.420 election or that he even lost his riding of Carlton. They don't really blame that on pure Polyev and

00:02:49.120 neither do I blame pure Polyev specifically for the Conservative Party losing. So that's the obvious

00:02:55.120 faction. I think it is going to be the largest faction. I think right now Polyev, again, could 0.64

00:03:00.480 either maybe win 80% of the vote up to 95% of the vote like Danielle Smith almost did at the last UCP

00:03:07.480 convention. Things are a little bit different when it comes to federal politics or even other provincial

00:03:12.580 parties because while the United Conservative Party in Alberta lets basically anyone who is a member

00:03:18.320 in good standing buy a delegate pass and show up and vote, in the Conservative Party of Canada and

00:03:24.200 other parties around Canada, what happens is that there's only, I believe, 10 delegate slots per

00:03:31.380 riding and then I believe the MP of the riding or the riding president also gets an automatic slot.

00:03:36.480 But there's generally 10 votes per riding that could potentially show up to the

00:03:42.420 convention. Not everyone always has time and sometimes riding delegations only send seven

00:03:47.760 people or eight or sometimes only a few or they often show up with all 10, especially if those

00:03:54.720 ridings are nearby where the convention is being held. And so that's where things can get a little

00:04:00.540 bit more squirrely because the people who really like Polyev can't really organize to have everyone just

00:04:05.600 buy tickets and show up. You have to be on a board and you have to show up to a board delegate election

00:04:12.740 where you elect who's going to show up for your board. And so in theory, you could get more

00:04:17.900 anti-Polyev people getting through because that board happens to have a culture that is more red 0.99

00:04:25.000 Tory or something like that. So moving on from the yes Polyev people, I want to move on to one of the two 1.00

00:04:31.460 no factions. One of them is like the hard no faction and then the other one is what I would describe as

00:04:37.380 the soft no faction. Let's start with the hard no's. The hard no's are also what you could probably call

00:04:43.360 the Doug Ford conservatives, the Corey Tanike conservatives, the conservatives who aren't

00:04:48.620 really conservatives, the hyper-pragmatists who think Polyev was two to the right and so we need a

00:04:55.000 pragmatic, effectively a liberal running the party in order to beat the liberals. I think these people

00:05:01.220 are silly. I don't think that they actually have any merit behind what they're saying. They think 1.00

00:05:05.860 that because Doug Ford wins elections in Ontario, we need a Doug Ford federally. No, you do not. Doug

00:05:12.960 Ford sucks. Peer Polyev won a higher proportion of the vote in Ontario than Doug Ford did provincially. 1.00

00:05:19.560 Now, provincial and federal politics are different and there are different dynamics happening on each

00:05:24.420 level. But at the same time, that's what I would also answer these people back, that yeah, things are

00:05:30.400 different provincially. Doug Ford is always running, as Jamil Giovanni says, against some of the worst

00:05:35.620 opponents ever. Stephen Del Duca, you know, Andrew Horvath, Merit Stiles, Bonnie Crombie,

00:05:42.140 Kathleen Wynne. These are people who are a threat to Doug Ford. These people are easy to beat, whereas

00:05:48.200 Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney now are far more formidable liberals. They have more credibility in the

00:05:55.820 public, whereas previously the liberals in Ontario and the NDP were running washed up, hyper sanctimonious

00:06:03.380 progressives that Doug Ford could easily bat down, despite the fact that he doesn't do that good of

00:06:08.620 a job as Ontario Premier. He operates almost like the liberals before him, but because he's in power

00:06:15.160 and his opponents have like almost nothing to say against him because Doug Ford is doing what they

00:06:20.060 would do, they end up basically getting stuck in the mud and they can't get any momentum behind them

00:06:24.740 because they don't have anything to criticize Doug Ford over. It's not because there isn't things

00:06:28.280 worth criticizing Ford over. I've told people, vote for the new blue party of Ontario because

00:06:33.000 they're actually conservative, but the liberals in NDP don't really have a glove to lay on Doug 0.99

00:06:37.780 because they'd be doing the same things because they all suck, frankly. So I reject this faction's 0.98

00:06:44.380 criticisms of Pierre Polyev that he wasn't anti-Trump enough, that he was too conservative, that he

00:06:51.100 shouldn't have been going after the CBC, that he shouldn't be trying to cut spending in government.

00:06:56.140 We should actually be growing spending in government because that's what the people want. 0.98

00:07:00.900 I don't think that's true at all. I think Canadians actually want conservatism. If anything,

00:07:06.160 if I was to make a criticism of the 2025 campaign for the conservatives, it went too soft in many ways

00:07:12.300 that we only were proposing to cut spending or cut taxes under $50,000 by 15%. That's great if you're

00:07:20.240 only making $50,000 a year. Even that's not that great a cut because already, I believe the first

00:07:26.140 $18,000 of your income are already tax exempt. So you're only reducing 15% of taxes on the first,

00:07:34.560 what is it, $32,000 of tax or of income. We should have been offering 15% across the board,

00:07:42.000 including corporate taxes. We should have been reducing immigration, 100,000 PRs per year,

00:07:47.880 100,000 temporary foreign workers and 100,000 students. That's it. No extensions on TFW,

00:07:53.780 what is it? Not applications, but permits. If you're a temporary foreign worker, you are temporary.

00:08:02.380 You don't get to extend it past the time that we gave you, and then you can't reapply for another

00:08:06.680 year or two. That would be a really good way of making sure that the country doesn't become overrun

00:08:11.000 with cheap labor from countries where people frankly don't have any standards. So when they show up to 0.95

00:08:15.980 this country and they're blowing 90% of their income on food taxes and rent, they'll put up with

00:08:22.980 it when a Canadian obviously wouldn't put up with that because that's insane. But these people come

00:08:27.460 from somewhere where that's fine because it's better than where they used to be. So you're competing

00:08:32.780 against someone that you're not on a level playing field with. So that's the Doug Ford

00:08:36.740 conservatives. They're going to vote no because they're not conservative. They're hyper pragmatic.

00:08:40.840 You're going to get a lot of them coming from places like Quebec, Toronto, metro urban areas

00:08:46.700 who believe that the secret sauce is doing less, being more pragmatic, more like the liberals.

00:08:52.600 And now let's move on to the third faction who I'm considering the soft nose who are people who

00:08:58.820 probably like Pierre Polyev, but they don't like the HQ of the party. They didn't like how the

00:09:07.200 nominations were conducted. They didn't like how the appointments were made before the election.

00:09:12.920 They didn't like how flat footed the conservative party was when the swap happened with Justin Trudeau.

00:09:17.840 And it is kind of insane that before the election, there were 90 seats. There were 90 ridings in the

00:09:24.640 country that didn't have a candidate. At the same time, the conservatives were demanding an election.

00:09:29.320 That is what I consider gross negligence. And I can see I'm kind of like halfway between the yes Polyev 1.00

00:09:36.220 and the soft no Polyev factions in the sense I like Polyev, but I want HQ cleaned up. Frankly,

00:09:44.420 Jenny Byrne needs to be fired yesterday. A lot of other people in HQ need to be fired yesterday. 1.00

00:09:51.200 People who have been counseling risk aversion, people saying, oh, don't say this, don't do this.

00:09:56.600 There was, I've literally heard that there was a ban on candidates leaving their own ridings to go

00:10:03.440 help out in other ridings. There was a ban on candidates going to public events or debates or

00:10:09.600 meeting with community leaders unless it was signed off first by the party. And when I say that they

00:10:14.340 were locked in their own ridings, I mean, guys who were in safe ridings were not allowed to leave

00:10:20.420 that riding to go campaign elsewhere. Maybe that's not entirely true, but that's what I've heard from

00:10:26.540 people who are very experienced organizers, that guys who were saying, I'm going to win my riding

00:10:31.980 by 70%. Let me go to Edmonton. I'm going to ride, win my riding with 60% of the vote. Let me go

00:10:38.560 to the GTA area. And they weren't allowed to do it. And so what I would love to see in the party is

00:10:45.560 Polyev stays and a lot of the HQ goes. And I'm pretty sure that that is eventually going to happen

00:10:50.700 here. So I see a lot of the soft no poly of people saying, unless Polyev fixes this, I'm a no,

00:10:55.820 I think he is probably going to end up fixing a lot of these things. Because even from his own

00:11:01.300 political perspective of wanting to become prime minister, not in a selfish way, but obviously,

00:11:06.220 if you're the leader of a party, you want to become prime minister and make the changes that

00:11:09.940 you want to make. And I think that if he is properly self-interested in wanting to get stuff done

00:11:16.120 and win, he's going to have to leave behind, frankly, the losers whose entire political

00:11:21.400 campaign experience is losing close elections, losing elections that were winnable. And I have

00:11:27.640 this problem with parties all around Canada. There are so many people in the campaign business who I

00:11:34.400 say they're not campaign managers. They are risk managers. They go around telling you what you

00:11:39.220 shouldn't do. What can you say that's not going to attract any attention? And I always look at these

00:11:44.000 people and think campaigns are the business of getting attention. You need to get attention on

00:11:49.880 yourself so you can say what you want to do. Sometimes you have to be a little controversial

00:11:54.060 so people say, well, what's that guy all about? And then you can say, well, by the way, I want to

00:11:57.760 cut taxes by 20% across the board. And people are like, well, that sounds good. But if you just say

00:12:02.560 placid, boring things, what's the point of looking at you? And I think at times in the election,

00:12:08.660 even though Polyev is a very, you know, rightfully gets a lot of attention, and he's a very charismatic

00:12:14.240 person, I felt like the people who were advising him on what to say were advising him to be boring

00:12:20.000 at times. Because people were saying, after you listen to like the first stump speech he gave during

00:12:24.860 the campaign, you've heard them all. Because his team was saying, don't say this, don't do that,

00:12:29.540 don't talk about that. And so he kind of stuck to those safer elements of his campaign that he's

00:12:34.960 talked about over time. And because Carney, whether it was dishonest or not, and it was dishonest because

00:12:40.420 he believes in carbon tax, when he got rid of the carbon tax, it did take a major plank away from the

00:12:45.480 conservative campaign that they really couldn't talk about anymore. And nobody seemed to want to

00:12:50.580 replace it. And that's a problem. And the thing is that leaders only have so much time to make

00:12:55.800 decisions during the campaign. So if their campaign manager, if the national director is going to start

00:13:01.480 saying, only say this, only do this, the leader doesn't really have time to take five days off

00:13:06.480 the campaign trail to say, hey, hey, hey, guys, reset. Why are we doing this soft, tabulum nonsense,

00:13:12.780 where we just sound like liberals, like light liberals? We should be talking about slashing taxes

00:13:18.360 and slashing immigration. They're like, no, no, no, we might tick off certain interest groups.

00:13:22.920 It was ridiculous. And I would say the biggest thing that needs to be fixed

00:13:26.420 is nominations. If you are skewing nominations to nominate candidates who are objectively not the

00:13:35.580 best at campaigning because they couldn't have won the nomination on their own, you are going to start

00:13:39.100 dropping a lot of the ridings in the general election. And we saw that. In fact, we saw Hindu 0.98

00:13:44.340 voters, Hindu-Canadian voters, who, by the way, are the second most likely religious group to vote

00:13:49.000 conservative after evangelical Protestant Christians. They stopped showing up for the conservatives because

00:13:55.020 pretty much in certain areas like Brampton and Mississauga, almost every single Hindu candidate

00:13:58.780 was just disqualified from the nominations, whereas no seat candidate was really kicked out.

00:14:04.780 And, you know, eventually, Hindu people are not hyper-collectivist where they require a Hindu 0.99

00:14:08.960 candidate to be on the ballot for them to show up. They usually don't care. I know tons of Hindu people.

00:14:13.380 They took this personally, and I would say somewhat rightfully so, when literally like a dozen Hindu 1.00

00:14:19.380 candidates in your region just get whacked for no reason and nobody can say why, yeah, you're going to

00:14:25.000 cause a lot of the community not to show up. And whoever was making these nomination decisions,

00:14:29.000 that person should be fired. That person should be potentially prosecuted for basically gross

00:14:33.940 negligence and basically wasting the party's money and time nominating people that were the lesser

00:14:40.060 candidates. This is what happens when you nominate and appoint people who couldn't have won a nomination

00:14:44.700 on their own, and they either needed help from the party HQ or they needed their opponents

00:14:49.440 disqualified. You are nominating people who are bad candidates. It's just that simple. I was kicked

00:14:55.680 out of Calgary Signal Hills nomination, and the guy that certain people in the party wanted to win

00:15:00.160 couldn't even win the nomination still because I told my people to vote down ballot against that

00:15:04.880 person. Then that person, after they still lost Calgary Signal Hills nomination, was then thrown into

00:15:09.940 the Calgary Confederation nomination. They were just appointed to it the day after the election was called,

00:15:14.980 and that person still lost that riding. And it's like, maybe it's because they're not very good at

00:15:21.240 this, and you shouldn't kick people out like me and others who actually are good at campaigning and

00:15:25.760 good at messaging to the public. But whatever. So going forward to January, I think Polly is probably 0.98

00:15:31.380 going to pull it out. If I'm making a prediction of what he's going to get in a leadership review,

00:15:35.100 I would say it's probably going to be 88% to 92% in that range if he does the right things. If

00:15:40.660 people start sticking around HQ, if there's no changes made, if the party kind of goes a little

00:15:46.220 bit too soft on certain policy issues, I could see people getting restless and starting to say,

00:15:51.060 well, can we get something better? I still feel like he would pass, but if it gets closer,

00:15:55.260 it's going to wound him as leader. And I really don't want to see that happen because I'm looking

00:15:59.820 around, and Polly was already pretty, like, really good as a leader. I don't even see anyone around who 0.99

00:16:04.680 could replace him. So this is the tightrope I'm in. I want changes made in HQ, but I also really want

00:16:10.500 peer polio to stick around. But anyways, that's just my thoughts. Give me your thoughts in the

00:16:15.000 comment section below. Subscribe if you're not a subscriber, like the video, and I will see you

00:16:19.820 guys later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 18, 2025

Pierre Poilievre facing leadership review in January 2026!

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