Conservative campaign manager Jenni Byrne says she won’t run the next campaign

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will have to hire a new campaign manager for the next election, now that Jenni Byrne has said she will not be returning to the role.

Byrne said that while there are “a few” things she wishes she could have done differently during the campaign, “none of them, I think, would have changed the outcome” of the April 28 election.

Byrne has been the target of criticism since the Conservatives lost their fourth-straight election to the Liberals this spring. Some within the party have called for her to be fired but Poilievre has stood by her.

Byrne, who ran campaigns for former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2011 and 2015, remains a key adviser to the Tory leader.

“I talk to caucus, I’m involved in policy files,” she said in a wide-ranging interview with the Beyond a Ballot podcast released on Friday.

“I speak to people on a daily basis, and I’m going to continue to do that,” she added. “But I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day.”

The interview — the first she has given since Canadians went to the polls — was hosted by Rachael Segal, a lawyer and political strategist who was a policy director in the Harper government. Beyond a Ballot describes itself as a multi-partisan group that looks to get more women engaged in politics.

The Canadian Press has reached out to Byrne for comment but has not heard back.

Byrne said she stands by the decision not to focus the Conservative campaign on U.S. President Donald Trump and his tariffs.

“We had a very good campaign message: affordability, cost of living, housing,” she said, adding the campaign appealed to a new kind of Conservative voter who “didn’t have the luxury to vote on Donald Trump.”

She praised the “extreme discipline” Poilievre showed during the campaign that kept him from getting distracted, even as the Liberals tried to make the mercurial president the main ballot question for voters.

“From a practical point of view, I don’t know what we would have said every day. What do you say?” she said.

Byrne said the Liberals won the election because Prime Minister Mark Carney “lied — and there’s no other way to put it — he lied and said, you know, ‘I’ve negotiated with Trump.'”

When asked how the Conservatives lost the election just months after holding a 20-point lead in the polls, Byrne echoed what Poilievre has been saying since April.

“Well, we stayed at 41 per cent of the votes. The Liberals went up and the NDP went down and the Bloc (Québécois) went down,” she said.

As for her regrets, Byrne said she wished “we had seen what was happening in Pierre’s riding sooner.”

Poilievre lost his seat in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy, who launched a campaign to oust the Conservative leader two years before the election call.

Poilievre had represented the riding since 2004, winning seven straight elections, including a narrow win in 2015 when the Trudeau Liberals swept into power.

Days before the election, media reports said Poilievre was in trouble in Carleton and the party had pulled additional staff and volunteers into the riding to save the seat. The party publicly dismissed those concerns, saying it was confident Poilievre would win.

Byrne said the warning signs came too late.

“But that being said, I’m not sure what we could have done about it at the time, because it would have been so late that moving seats would have been strange, and there were not a lot of seats left,” she added.

Poilievre is now running in a byelection in a sprawling rural Alberta riding. People in Battle River—Crowfoot will go to the polls on Aug. 18 and the Conservative leader is widely expected to win by a wide margin.

MPs are set to return to the House of Commons for the fall sitting in mid-September.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 8, 2025.

Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press