Jenni Byrne stands by not pivoting Poilievre to Trump, but won't run next election campaign

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's campaign manager Jenni Byrne says she won't be running her party's campaign in the next federal election and stands by her decision not to have pivoted the message in the last campaign to focus more on the threat posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

In her first post-election interview, Byrne told the Beyond a Ballot podcast she's currently providing Poilievre and the caucus with some advice on policy files. 

"I speak to people on a daily basis and I'm going to continue to do that, but I've stepped back from the day-to-day and I'm not going to run the next campaign," she said on the podcast released Friday.

In the weeks after the spring vote, pressure mounted on Poilievre to fire Byrne, who critics hold responsible for the Conservatives squandering a 25-point lead in an election that also saw the party's leader lose his Ottawa-area seat. 

"I can understand why people feel let down ... victory was close. People could taste it and people are desperate for change," she said. 

Poilievre lost his seat after serving as an MP for the Carleton riding for more than 20 years when Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy defeated him by a margin of 4,500 votes.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford's former campaign manager Kory Teneycke was an outspoken critic of the federal Conservative campaign during the 2025 election, suggesting it was headed for disaster and urgently needed to pivot its message and strategy.

Teneycke told CBC News in March that Poilievre and his team were running their campaign as if the main opponent was still former prime minister Justin Trudeau and that the cost of living, inflation and the housing crisis were the issues that mattered most to Canadians, when in fact voters were clearly indicating Trump had become top of mind. 

Complicating matters, Teneycke said, was that Poilievre sounded too "Trumpy."

What do you say about Trump? Byrne asks

Byrne told Beyond a Ballot the decision not to pivot away from affordability issues and toward Trump was taken consciously and she still stands by it. 

"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. What do you say?" 

Byrne said that aside from not knowing what to say about the U.S. president, switching the campaign to focus on Trump would have turned off the new voters that were flocking to the party over their affordability message. 

"If we had gone down that road ... we would not have come up with the [143] seats that we got," she said.

Byrne says the affordability message resonated with newer voters to the party who were seized by the cost of living crisis and "didn't have the luxury" of worrying about Trump. For that reason, she said, the party's strategy is unlikely to change. 

"The coalition that we have now is going to be the coalition that at least is going to be the anchor for us going forward," she said. 

'The Pierre story is not finished'

As for Poilievre losing his own riding, Byrne said the reason for that was that the riding had "changed a lot in the last 20 years," and now includes more members of the public service. 

Byrne said that in recent years there has been "massive hiring in the public service" and that when Poilievre was "honest ... that there were going to have to be cuts made to the public service, [it] upset certain voters."

"I do wish that we had seen what was happening in Pierre's riding sooner than what we did, but that being said, I'm not sure what we could have done about it at the time," she said.

"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 currently running in a byelection in the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, which he is expected to take easily in the Aug. 18 vote.

The party is set to review Poilievre's leadership at the Conservative convention in January, where Byrne says she expects members to rally to the leader and back him into the next election.

"I 100 per cent believe that he is the right leader for the party. There is not a doubt in my mind at all," she said. 

"It is unfortunately going to be a two-step process instead of a one-step process," she said. "This Pierre story is not finished."