Front Burner - Canadian Conservative infighting goes public

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

It’s no secret that there are factions in the Conservative movement in Canada and that not everyone gets along. But over the last couple of weeks Conservative infighting has spilled out into the public with barbs in speeches, podcasts, and social media. Nick Taylor-Vaisey is the Ottawa bureau chief with Politico Canada. He breaks down the sniping and what it says about the state of the Conservative party. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. So it's no secret that there are factions in the conservative movement in Canada. And that not everyone gets along. But over the last couple of weeks, conservative infighting has been spilling out into the public, with barbs in speeches, on podcasts, in the pages of newspapers, and of course, on social media. So today on Front Burner, I'm talking to Nick Taylor Vacey. He's the Ottawa Bureau Chief with Politico Canada, and he's here to break down what all of this sniping is about and what it says about the state that the party's in right now. Nick, it's great to have you on from Burner. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. It's really cool to be here. So let's start with the latest flurry of infighting. What kicked this all off? Well, I was in the room in Calgary at Stampede and Pierre Pollyov in a keynote speech that covered a lot of ground. a lot of it familiar. In there, he snuck in this line about the BC conservative race, which I think was meant at the beginning of the line to just pump up Carrie Lynn Findlay, the winner of that race, the new BC conservative leader who was in the room. The future premier of British Columbia, Carrie Lynn Finley.

Way to go. Fresh off a big win against liberal lobbyists from out east. We've got our former leader. But not long after, I started getting texts from people. who noted the other end of that line, that thing about those liberal lobbyists. And so that set it off. I just want to slow down a tiny bit and translate it for some people who might be a bit confused, right? Because as you just said, Carrie Lynn Finley is this former conservative MP from BC who recently won this tight race to become leader of the BC Conservative Party.

And this was a leadership race that she won against other conservatives, not a general election. So, you know, why is Pollyev saying that she beat liberal lobbyists? Well, that was a veiled reference, not veiled to anybody who's following all the gossip in conservative circles these days, but to the uninitiated, that was a veiled reference to Corey Tenek, who has won three straight campaigns in Ontario. He has been Doug Ford's campaign manager very successfully. And there was bad blood between Corey Tenek, who was very much a conservative and Pierre Poliev.

They come from the same place. Like Corey Tenek was a director of communications to Stephen Harper in Ottawa at the same time that Pierre Polyev was a rising conservative in Ottawa, a member of parliament who eventually entered Stephen Harper's cabinet. I mean, these are two conservatives. And Pierre Polyev just, anytime he doesn't like a conservative, he seems to freely brand them a liberal. He did that to Jean Choray, his opponent during the leadership race in 2022. Now, Mr. Choray learned about the trucker convoy on CBC, like other liberals, and he misrepresented them. He's done it along the way to the present day, and Corey Tenek is the most recent, is most recently on the receiving end of that. And just tell me a little bit more about why Polyev doesn't like Corey to Nike on this beef between Corey and Ontario progressive conservative Doug Ford and just kind of the origin story of that.

Well, Polyev doesn't like Corey Tenek because I don't think Cory Tenek very much likes Pure Polyev. In the last federal campaign, Corey was on the curse of politics, a podcast that he's still on and still voicing on. And he just went after the Polyev national campaign. We talk sometimes about campaign malpractice. Blowing a 25 point lead and being like 10 points down is campaign malpractice at the highest level. He was arguably

the biggest critic of that campaign. This campaign is going to be studied for decades as the biggest staking disaster. And so that set off this feud. And they have a lot of friends in common. Like the conservative movement as much as it's fractured, it's also full

of people who get along really well and who've worked together over and over again over the years. And so it's produced this kind of awkward situation where you have people who are friends, probably with both. Also people who are friends with neither, who disagree. about exactly what the conservative should do next to remain united. And it all happens during the summer when everybody's working the barbecue circuit.

Nobody really wants to talk about politics anyway. So awkward is the way I would describe it, or at least that's one of many adjectives we could use. And you mentioned all those comments that Corey made on the politics podcast, Curse of Politics during the election. He actually went on that same podcast last week, I think, right? Yeah. After Pollyev's comments at the stampede. and he just went off.

I think somebody needs to do a wellness check on Pierre Polyev. I think he's showing some signs of some sort of rupture from reality or mental breakdown. I don't know. Basically called Polyev unemployable. At the end of the day, you've got to bear in mind that, well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Pollyette is completely unemployable. He could work at McDonald's or Tim Hortons or all kinds of places. But he is impossible to employ in an equivalent type position with the level of stature and prestige and compensation, both monetary and non-monetary, that he has currently.

And I think his entire ego and self-image is wrapped up and frozen in time in 2024 where it looked like he was going to be prime minister. It was really kind of nasty stuff getting aired amongst people who are ostensibly, as you pointed out, supposed to be on the same side. And there will be a new episode of Curse of Politics out by the time this episode airs. So I'm guessing he might have more to say then. I want to talk to you about a few other things that have been said these last few weeks, because this is all rippled out beyond some personal animist between these two. two guys. In making his dig at Tonight, Pollyev was also kind of making a dig at the woman

tonight was working for in B.C. Caroline Elliott, a young woman who was running to be the leader of the B.C. Conservatives, but lost just by 60 votes. And so she puts out this video on social media addressing Pollyette directly. Hi, Pierre. Caroline Elliott here. Where she's basically like, whoa, whoa, I'm a fan. I've tried to help you. I vote a conservative my entire life. I voted for you in your own CPC leadership race. My family and friends donate to you at my encouragement. I've attended events and knocked on doors for you. Spoken up for you on social media and in my columns

that you've actually posted to your own social media. I was the only candidate to publicly endorse you ahead of your leadership review vote earlier this year. And just what is her big message in this video? Her big message is, let's stop fighting. Please, for the love of God. So your MPs, and now you personally, celebrating my defeat in the BC Conservative leadership race is disappointing.

The race is over, and it's time to unite, not divide. Why don't we focus on beating liberals? And she's not alone in saying that. A lot of conservative commentators these days are saying, you know what liberals are really good at doing? They're really good at winning. That might mean the overhaul their platforms completely in service to finding a way to convince enough voters that they deserve power.

But the liberals, since the dawn of Confederation, have been very good at that. Conservatives, not so much when you look at the electoral record. So they're saying, why on earth are we disagreeing with each other with such personal animus? When you look at the polls, we're down. The liberals are taking our ideas. They're governing on them. Mark Carney is convincing enough soft conservatives that he's kind of conservative. He's convincing all the liberal voters.

He's just as liberal as they need him to be. Through all of this, liberals are continuing this kind of year-plus-long honeymoon. Meanwhile, it's just these personal battles on the conservative side. So Carolyn Elliott is one voice that in BC is saying, what the heck are we doing? Let's focus on the common enemy here, not on these disputes that are tearing us apart. I'll keep fighting every day to bring people together for the future of my province and our country. I just hope you decide to do that too. Elliot and Polly of their politics, they don't seem very different.

Is that fair for me to say? These aren't a mixture of red Tories and hard social conservatives. These are kind of similarly solidly true blue conservatives on the issues. They disagree with liberals and new Democrats about most things. And they agree amongst themselves about most things, like you say, when it comes to policy. But the persistent problem for the conservative movement in Canada is that what divides these people is just cleats. and preferred leaders of various factions of the movement that I guess are just fighting about who's best to send the message.

But like any movement, like any social group, there's friction and there's infighting just because some people don't like each other. And that for some reason, with conservatives more than liberals, it just burbles up and it has threatened times to swallow them whole over the years. And right now, it's what's really driving this persistent summertime argument in comment pages and blogs and I guess Twitter. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters. And while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada.

Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world class now. This week on two blocks from the White House. From Lindsay Graham's sudden death to Mitch McConnell's absence and Graham Plattner's campaign collapse. This week we're asking, with the midterm elections only months away, what is going on with the Senate? Join me, Willie Lowry, and my fellow Washington correspondence, Paul Hunter and Katie Simpson, as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective.

Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. And watch us on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. You mentioned that Elliot and Pollyav share friends in the movement. I'm thinking of Bed Wood Finden, right, who worked on Elliott's campaign and was also a former director of communications for Pauliq. And so he put out a tweet where he said, I'm more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than I've ever been pretty grim stuff to be saying publicly. After that tweet got a lot of conservatives talking, he followed up with this piece. And without diminishment, this is like a relatively new conservative substack. And the piece is called, Are You Angry Enough?

And I just want to quote this piece here because I found it quite interesting. And also, I think is probably another example of the point that you were making earlier. He writes, we now assign ideological identity by association and vibe rather than conviction. And a person can be read out of the movement without a single one of their actual beliefs ever being examined. There is also a big contingent of conservative influencers in this country. And I just am curious to hear what role you think that they're playing in this infighting, right? Because up until now, we've really been talking about kind of insiders in the Conservative Party. I think it would be really easy to dismiss influencers online as having influence only online.

It's very clear that there is spillover into the real world. Like at Pierre Polyev's Leadership Review in Calgary earlier this year, there was a big party at a bar in southwestern Calgary put on by a whole bunch of influencers. This is going to be the biggest conservative influencer get together for free. For free in our history. There's so many more people showing up.

You guys have no idea. We have a lot of numbers of parliament showing up. We have some surprises. And there was a big group they attracted to that place to celebrate what it is to be like a hard right. I won't say far right, although maybe that term applies in some cases but just like really, truly not a liberal online.

Celebrating each other was something that happened offline. So it's not just a Twitter thing. These people are in every room that matters. They were all over that leadership convention. They're in Calgary. A lot of them are based at West anyway. So it's not too expensive for them to go to a place like Calgary Stampede. I don't know how much influence they have in policymaking.

I don't know how many of them will actually find their way to a campaign. where they will have put skin in the game and actually sort of, you know, like knock on doors for a candidate as opposed to go to a rally and and just put something online about it. But there's, I think, there's some sort of influence there that is, it's more than nothing, but I don't know if it amounts to a significant shift in how conservative broadly, especially conservative voters generally think about politics. These influencers, I wonder if you could kind of flesh out for me a little bit more, what version, of the conservative party they're kind of most interested in it. They seem broadly to be the most interested in a conservative party that loves to attack liberals. I think that's the easiest way to sum it up. They don't believe that Mark Carney is anything, in some cases anyway, is anything more than

another Trudeau. All he's doing is collecting taxes, increasing taxes, spending tax money on programs that favor liberal insiders. The idea that these liberals are just in it for themselves, And a lot of the influencers online really just love fueling that because they truly believe that. And so they don't so much get to the practical governing part, right? They don't say, here's what we believe a conservative movement should actually accomplish on the way to getting to power. It's more like, boy, do I hate liberals, which is perfectly fine.

People online are allowed to be that way. But I think that is what maybe limits their influence in the actual machinery of the party to this point anyway is there are a lot of people like some of the characters we mentioned before. Dan Robertson, another Harper era guy, well respected by many, also wrote about this recently. They want to focus on winning and they want to focus on pulling the actual levers of power. They help get you there. The influence just not so much. They are happy to be disappointed in liberals. Yeah. I just, when Polly have made those remarks, Do you think in a way he might have been speaking to these guys?

Yeah, sure. Yeah. I think he probably had a few audiences in mind. I think one was himself. It sounded like an outburst more than a planned line. I don't know that for sure. But sometimes you can tell what is on the script and what is a verbal aside that he just couldn't help but deliver. I think another audience was just the room.

Right. He knew these people would applaud if he called out Carrie Lynn Finley's presence in room because she's the kind of conservative that people at Calgary Stampede would applaud heartily. And she did get one of the biggest cheers of the night. And then probably Corey Tenaik was intended audience. He knew that would get back to Corey. And then, yeah, the kind of the id of the conservative movement, the influencers who would take that and run, love the idea that their party leader is going after a conservative they don't

like because they don't like Doug Ford. They don't like how Ontario does conservative politics. Yeah, I'm sure that was an audience as well. Let's step away from conservative insiders and influencers now and look at the conservative caucus itself, the actual MPs who make up the conservative party in opposition. And I know that they lost yet another one of their own this month. in Quebec MP Richard Martel. He didn't cross the floor to the liberals.

Rather, he was appointed by Mark Carney to the Senate. And just in general, what is the vibe in caucus right now? I think the vibe starts with, thank God it's the summer, and we don't have to be in Ottawa anymore, which is, I think, more true for conservatives than any other party, except maybe the NDP in the last few months. Then they get home. And now they're spending their summers at barbecues and, and with constituents, and they're kind of in what they would probably call listening mode. I'll be buzzwordy, but they do go to a lot of events and talk to a lot of people

about the state of affairs in this country. I think most MPs legitimately really do enjoy that part of this and probably aren't thinking a whole lot about how to shiv their leader or what's waiting for them when they get back to Ottawa at the end of September, what the future of their party is at this juncture. a few years out from an election. I just think it is not like the thing that is going to obsess them. They're not going to lose sleep over

it. It is the middle of July. It's hot out and they don't have to at this stage think that much about the real politic of being a conservative. Though I was interested to read on Monday. I think it was in the Hill Times.

They quoted this unnamed conservative MP as saying, you know, part of my language here, the morale is in the absolute shitter. Is that something that you're hearing as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that kind of goes part and parcel of what I'm saying. Like, they don't feel great about being in Ottawa because every time they come here, they're reminded that they lost, that they have very limited power.

They can filibuster a bill. They can slow things down. They can be jerks about it, but they can't stop a lot as long as the liberals have a majority. And as long as that election is like years away, man, they're just, they're not going to want to think about it. So now they have kind of an excuse. They can enter summer mode. I have no reason to think that the unnamed Hilltime source is on the wrong track there.

I also wouldn't overstate it, though. Like, Pierre Polyev's leadership result, 87.5% support in January. It was real. I don't think if he did it again today, he'd be under 50%. Like, I think not enough has changed in the country to kill his hopes of one day becoming prime minister. I think his hold on the leadership is relatively solid at this point. But in part, I think that's because it's the summer. Yeah, I mean, because I don't know if you would agree with this, but it seemed to me like even before the summer, he's kind of hold on the party was fraying

a little bit, hold on the caucus, right, from the top. We've seen other MPs making statements that seem to be off message track, our conservative MP, Jamil Giovanni, calling out what he called liberal degeneracy, disgusting images of him at the Toronto Pride Parade. I think it's shameful that we have a prime minister shaking hands with half-naked dudes wearing perverted costumes at a parade. I also think it's especially shameful that there were children present during that spectacle. That's pretty inflammatory divisive language. Like, do you think that that statement was greenlit by pure public? Pahlia's office, or is Giovanni doing his own thing there?

I think Jamil Giovanni is doing his own thing there. And I think it's worth also distinguishing between Pollyev's hold on power, at least as you can define the conservative leadership as holding power, and keeping control of his caucus, because I think he can be relatively safe in his job, but be losing a little bit of control of his caucus's statements. It's a huge 180 from about a year ago. In the last federal election, I had one conservative candidates speak to me on the record the entire time. We were just locked down.

And that was true in a lot of ways and a lot of places. Now, conservatives are much freer to say what they think, to choose their own track and to kind of follow it. Polyev is not clamping down as much. And the people in his office are not clamping down as much on members of parliament who have controversial opinions. They even disagree with each other sometimes now, which is a fact of life in politics. Usually, it stays behind closed doors. Now we're seeing that among conservatives a bit more out in the open. Frankly, as a reporter, it's kind of, it's like kind of nice that conservatives will now talk more because we get legitimately a better sense of how they view the

world than what they want to accomplish. But if you're a leader who wants message discipline, it's it's not, it's clearly not a polyp priority right now. Just to come back squarely to this feud that's been spilling out into the open, too, you mentioned before Dan Robertson, former Harper advisor, he had this piece that he wrote on Substack that gets republished in the Walriths called The Conservative Feud is embarrassing, grow up. And he writes that there is no version of internal conservative warfare that ends well. But at this point, do you see this ending at all? Do you see any signs that everyone's going to kind of kiss and make up here?

How could this be reigned in? Well, he's one of the advocates for getting offline, right? And going and not just fighting these permanent, awkward battles on the internet. That sounds like the kind of thing you would do at a party gathering like they had in Calgary earlier this year. It sounds like something you might do if enough of you are in Calgary again for Stampede, where you're flipping pancakes and you're going to boozy receptions and maybe that's where you can settle some differences. I don't know what the obvious place, what the obvious arena for that is, in lieu of these

examples I've just discussed, like usually parties settle these things in competitions or at policy conventions. The BC conservative leadership race has only produced a new fracture. The stampede, as much as the conservative MPs who were there were happy to be there, they were flipping pancakes, having a good time. It's a pretty cool place to be. It's a pretty fun time. Obviously, there wasn't a lack of conservative discourse coming out of it about the future of the party. So that didn't serve that purpose.

I don't know what their next opportunity is for that, aside from a caucus meeting back in Ottawa, a place. A lot of these conservatives would rather not be. Yeah. I just one final question for you, do you get the sense here that there are personalities involved in all of this that might not be conducive to all of branches or this kind of hashing it out solution that other people in the party seem to be advocating? Well, Dan Robertson also wrote that I'm paraphrasing here, so I don't want to misquote him, but like the leader. of the party sets the tone. And so if Pierre Pollyev didn't want to inflame a fight with a Doug Ford advisor, a very successful one of that, he wouldn't have to. He doesn't have to.

He doesn't have to go after, even as collateral damage, an unsuccessful BC conservative candidate who probably has a pretty bright future in the federal conservative party or the provincial wing. These are all choices he makes. He could be different. And at times over his years as conservative leader, he has been different, including quite recently. He talked about how he respects Mark Carney. Mark Carney respects him. They have a decent relationship.

That was earlier this year. They were seen before they both left the country for their various international sojourns talking in the House of Commons lobby about their trips. They seem to be truly two leaders just talking to each other on respectful terms. But that's not the polyv we saw at Stampede. It's not the polys of we're seeing a lot this summer. So he seems to kind of yo-yo between these versions of himself. He could be, he could stick to one track. He could end a certain amount of fighting.

Not all of it. No leader can solve every problem internally. But I don't know who else you point to. All right. Nick, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.