In rare interview, Poilievre’s campaign chief says she regrets riding loss
The Conservative Party’s 2025 federal campaign chief Jenni Byrne says not realizing sooner that leader Pierre Poilievre was in trouble in his riding remains one of her main regrets from the election.
“I do wish that we had seen what was happening in Pierre’s riding sooner than what we did,” Byrne said in an interview on the “Beyond a Ballot” podcast this week.
In the interview, Byrne’s first since the April election, she spoke about the campaign and what’s next for her following her time as one of Poilievre’s top advisers.
The longtime political strategist, who also served as an adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper during his years in government, told the podcast that despite her regret about not recognizing trouble in Poilievre’s riding, she isn’t sure they could have done much at the time.
“It would’ve been late, so late that moving seats would have been strange, and there were not a lot of seats left,” she said.
In the last days of the federal campaign, there was growing speculation that Poilievre was in danger of losing his longtime Ottawa-area riding of Carleton — a result that came to fruition on election night when Liberal MP Bruce Fanjoy unseated the seven-term MP.
Byrne said during the podcast that Poilievre previously addressed this following his loss, but said the seat had changed “a lot” in the past 20 years.
However, she added Poilievre’s remarks during the campaign that cuts would be made to the federal public service may have upset voters in his riding, which is rural in some areas while also being home to a growing number of subdivisions in Ottawa’s southwestern suburbs.
Poilievre is currently seeking to return to Parliament in the byelection for the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot on Aug. 18.
She was also asked about the party losing its fourth straight election, despite most polls in early January showing they had a 20-point lead that rapidly narrowed after former prime minister Justin Trudeau resigned and U.S. President Donald Trump entered office.
Pointing to the results the Conservatives got in the popular vote, 41 per cent, Byrne said they stayed about where polls predicted they’d land in terms of percentage, but NDP and Bloc Québécois votes shifted.
“The factor was that there were a certain segment of people that looked at Carney as change, and you had NDP voters, and Bloc voters for that matter, who kind of were concerned about Trump, and they went to Carney,” she said.
Byrne defended the campaign’s focus on affordability and cost of living even as Trump became a focus of the federal election.
Byrne said she had spoken with voters who said the party’s focus on affordability and housing appealed to them.
“We didn’t get distracted in terms of Trump. Did we talk about Trump, every single day … it just didn’t mean that that was going to be the only thing that we talked about,” she said.
“The Liberals wanted to talk about Trump. I think they were trying to bait us into talking about Trump, and from a practical point of view, I don’t know what we would have said every day. It would have turned off or at least, not turned off, but demotivated the group of people that ended up coming.”
When asked what’s next, Byrne confirmed she will stay on as an adviser for the Conservatives and Poilievre, but she won’t be leading the national campaign whenever the next federal election is held.
“I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day and I am not going to run the next campaign,” she said. “For me, when I run campaigns, it is a full-time job.”
She said she wants to give her full time to her consulting business.
Byrne also criticized Carney, saying there’s been “no change.”
“Nothing’s changed on immigration, nothing has changed on crime, and also he seems to be stringing the premiers and everyone along in terms of the 20 nation-building projects. It looks like we’re nowhere closer to getting those.”
It’s why, she added, she believes Poilievre remains the right leader for the Conservatives and that party members just need to be patient for him to become prime minister.
“It is unfortunately going to be a two-step process as opposed to a one-step process,” she said.
— With files from Global News’ Alex Boutilier
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