Poilievre's campaign against Alberta separation | The Big Story [0:00-5:04]

Frequency podcast network, stories that matter, podcasts that resonate. It's been an interesting last few months for Pierre Paulier in the Conservatives. With the exit of several MPs, Mark Carney securing his majority reports of a toxic intercochist work culture last year, the pretty real threat of Alberta separating from Canada, the podcast story did across the US. It's been a lot. And as Parliament heads on summer break until September, is there a chance for the party to regroup after the last few months? Come back on the same page and head into the fall session with unity? Possibly. But what do those conversations look like and who's at the table having them? Where do priorities lie for the opposition at this critical moment for Canadian identity? And what balancing act does Paulier have ahead of him to appease both traditional conservatives and younger supporters who are vocal as ever online, but don't necessarily show up to the ballot box? I'm Maria Castan and today I'm a big story. I'm talking to city news political correspondent Glen McGregor to catch ourselves up on where Paulier has been at and how the Conservatives have been handling everything that's transpired in the last few months. Glen, it is so great to have you back on the big story. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me back. Where are the Conservatives sitting right now, Glen, in the polls? How do Canadians feel about the job they're doing? Yeah, the Conservatives are still running behind the governing liberals by, depending on whose poll you look at anywhere from 7-8 to 10, even 11%, these things bounce around every week, sometimes bouncing around in the margin of air. But that is still a substantial gap. It's for the liberals better than they were even after the federal election that they won last year, and much better than where they were, let's say, back in early 2025 when Justin Trudeau was still prime minister, and the Conservatives were sitting on a 20-25% point lead in most public opinion polling that they were on the way to potentially a conservative majority government led by PR Paulieff, and that is not the case now. In fact, it's all enough, Mark Carney, in the majority position now as, and since it's happening, I'm going to say at a time that House Commons has set to break for the summer. So it's a good kind of inflection point. We think MPs are supposed to sit into the next week. They may break off a little bit earlier, and I think there'll be a lot of sort of interrospection in the conservative ranks now to sort of decide which way they're going. Remember back in January, we had this review process of PR Paulieff's leadership, and he got a resoundingly high number in that 87% of those who voted in that review process. Like, even though it was held in Calgary, and there was some grumbling that it was maybe a bit skewed because it might have been harder for other people, from other parts of the country to get there. And of course, Paulieff is now an Alberta MP because he lost in the federal election. He lost his own writing in the Ottawa area, and then ran successfully in that bi-election in Alberta in a very, very safe conservative seat. But have things kind of shifted back in the other direction since then. We're not really seeing a lot of it. There are new polls out just in the last couple of days that show that liberal lead that we've seen pretty resilient lead. It hasn't really changed a whole lot. There's not been any major swings over the past couple of months. But we're seeing a little bit of maybe softening of the liberal lead, and Mark Carney's personal approval levels softening a bit as well. What we haven't seen is any sort of great uppouring of support for Paulieff, and I think that may concern some party leaders. I think the more interesting stuff about Paulieff is going on kind of below the surface. You're not necessarily seeing it in the polls, but it's kind of within caucus. And a lot of it actually, some of it is playing out online. There seems to be kind of a schism in the party that's happening right now between what you would consider to be old guard conservatives and newer ones. And this is something that the modern conservative party has been dealing with for a very long time. Because remember, this party we see right now is essentially a union adjoining together of the PC party with Canadian Alliance, which before that was the reform party. So you're kind of jamming together two disparate groups. But what we're seeing now is a different split, a different schism. It seems to be more centrist conservatives, not necessarily PC party people.