Front Burner - The Conservative kingmaker behind Poilievre

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Three terms and a decisive majority under Stephen Harper. Erin O'Toole's leadership run — and subsequent castigation. Pierre Poilievre's meteoric ascendency to within striking distance of the country's top office.What do these things all have in common? Jenni Byrne, the longtime Conservative powerbroker running Poilievre's campaign, who has moved in the party's inner circles since first joining the Reform Party at age 16.Simon Lewsen recently profiled Byrne for Maclean's. He takes us through her biggest wins, her most crushing losses, and why her unwavering commitment to populist conservative principles has been her greatest strength — but may now have become one of the campaign's biggest liabilities.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. Jenny Byrne has a lot of admirers, and also some enemies. And almost all of them would likely describe her in similar terms.

Principled. Brilliant. Fearsome. Ruthless. You may not know her name, but she's one of the most powerful Canadian political operators of the past two decades. She helped former Prime Minister Stephen Harper survive a parliamentary crisis that nearly brought down his government in 2008.

And she helped him win a majority in 2011. She led the campaign that delivered Pierre Poliev a landslide victory in the conservative leadership vote in 2022. And now she's the key player behind his campaign for Prime Minister. Just a few months ago of course Poliev seemed like a shoe-in to win. Now everything has changed and as the Liberals fortunes have risen some inside the conservative campaign have started to turn on Bern, leaking their discontent with her leadership to the media. So who is Jenny Byrne? What does she believe in and what has she accomplished?

And if Poliev wins or if he loses, what is at stake for her? Simon Lucin joins me today. Simon is a great magazine journalist and recently wrote this profile for Maclean's all about Jenny Byrne. Hi Simon, thank you so much for being here. Hi, Simon. Thank you so much for being here.

Hi, Jamie. Thanks so much for having me. So the first thing to know about Jenny Byrne is that she has knocked on a lot of doors, probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of doors, which is actually quite unusual for such a high up political operative. Why does she do this? What do you think it says about how she sees politics? Yeah, everywhere she goes she knocks on doors.

Despite the fact that door knocking is the lowest form of grunt work and she's one of the most senior people in the party, but it speaks to this very deep belief she has that you have to connect and understand ordinary people. There's this sense that when you get into politics, you can find yourself in a bubble. You can find yourself in places like the Albany Club, hobnobbing with other elites, and you can lose that lifeline

to what everyday voters think and feel. And the only way to maintain that lifeline is to refresh your connection with everyday voters constantly and all the time, and she does it all the time. I mentioned in the intro that Byrne commands a lot of admiration from many in conservative circles, but not universal admiration, right? And just you tell me a bit more about the qualities that people most admire and also most dislike about her. Yeah, she commands a huge amounts of admiration and a lot of other feelings as well. And often in the same people, people will have very mixed feelings about her. Yeah, she commands a huge amount of admiration and a lot of other feelings as well. And often in

the same people, people will have very mixed feelings about her. In terms of her strengths, in one of them is this incredible work ethic. She's the kind of person who will clean a campaign office or go and put up signs in the cold and snow. No job is below her level. She's not too good for anything. Another strength is her ability to intuit what ordinary voters are thinking. And this is because she's out there connecting with ordinary voters. Another huge strength is a kind of no nonsense, plain spoken, tell it like it is.

She has no problem calling up writing president or an MP and saying, you're getting lazy, you're getting slow. You better snap out of it or else there's going to be, there's going to be hell to pay. So she, and you can imagine that that makes her somewhat of a controversial figure. And then the other piece, the other interesting thing about Jenny Byrne, probably your Achilles heel, is for all her brilliance, there's a kind of lack of nimbleness.

There's a very specific idea about how politics should be done and she sticks to that idea. And sometimes it really works and sometimes it really doesn't. Right. And I think that that's a through line that we're going to pick up on a couple of times during this conversation, I would imagine. Definitely. This ability that you were talking about that she has to like intuit what voters want, just tell me how her upbringing might contribute to that.

So she was born in Fennell in Falls, Ontario, small former mill settlement in Ontario, a bit outside of Toronto in 1976, and to a large, I think Irish family, family of Irish background. And they felt profoundly estranged from mainstream politics in Canada. She came of age in the 1980s where the two dominant figures were Pierre Trudeau, who, you know, wore a boutonniere in his lapel and slept with Barbara Streisand and Brian Mulroney, who collected Gucci shoes. And the Burns, her mom was a kindergarten teacher, her dad was a carpenter who went on long hunting and fishing trips. And they just didn't see themselves reflected in Canada's leadership class.

And that sense of alienation from Canada's leadership class, I think, really explains her political loyalties all through her life. And she threw herself into politics very early on, right? Just tell me a bit more about how her political career got started. She joins the Reform Party at age 16 when her dad joins it. And the Reform Party is this new populist upstart based in Western Canada. And it's built around family values, small government, and a kind of fierce opposition to the sort of country club conservatism of the Tory establishment. And she finds a home for herself there as a teenager. And she moves very quickly up the ranks

of the Reform Party. Because the Reform Party is so anti-hierarchical, she has access to all of the top brass, the founder, Preston Manning, the guy who takes over as leader when the Reform Party becomes the alliance, Stockwell Day, and then Stephen Harper. So at a very, very young age,

she gets this incredible education in Canadian politics. What is clear reading your piece is that from then until now, her political beliefs really haven't wavered all that much. I don't know if you would agree with- 100%. Yeah, how I read into that. And just tell me more about that, this idea that she's really stuck to some pretty clear principles. There are pretty core principles that are bread and the bone.

It's a belief that centrists and progressive elites don't care about ordinary working people, a belief in a kind of blue collar, no nonsense conservatism, a rejection of anything that smacks of elitism, and a belief that conservatives can win and that they can win by fighting hard to win. There's no rule that says Canada is a nation of liberals. There's no rule that says the liberals always have to be the governing party, that conservatives can fight, they can take their message home, they can understand voters and they can win big.

And she's stuck to those principles all her life. And here's something that a lot of people listening might not know, might not know at all. She knows PR Polya very well. They actually dated for over a decade, starting in 1999. I knew that they had dated, but I had no idea until reading your piece that they were together for that long. What kind of similarities did they share in terms of their backgrounds and beliefs?

They both came from really humble backgrounds. They both have a sort of unapologetic approach to conservatism. They brought a kind of brash, youthful energy to the business of conservatism. They believe that they bring, they brought a kind of brash, youthful energy to the business of conservatism. This wasn't in their mind, a movement for sort of older, more staid people. This was a movement for young idealists with lots of energy and lots of conviction. And yeah, they dated for 12 years from 1999 to 2011 and have stayed close even after they broke up. Okay, so by the late 2000s, Byrne had ascended to become one of the most important people in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's inner circle, right? She gets in with Harper. She was serving as his director of issues management. And it sounds like she ran a really tight ship, right?

What kind of things did she do to keep, for example, MPs in line? Yeah, she's the kind of person, one of my sources joked that she's the kind of person who will call you at midnight on a Tuesday and say, you better call me back right now or else your phone will be deactivated and you're fired. There's a kind of no nonsense harshness that we win when we're disciplined and somebody has to enforce some discipline. A very close friend of hers denied that account, by the way, but I heard versions of that account from a variety of other people and I suspect it's true.

And she's widely credited with playing a pretty sizable role in a number of big wins for Harper, right? Yeah. Probably the biggest one was how she helped to shape his 2011 campaign, do you think? Just tell me more about what she did that seemed so counterintuitive at the time and why it is seen today as very consequential. So there is this sense, even within the Conservative Party, that the Liberals are the natural governing party in Canada. Yes, occasionally when we're good and fed up

with the Liberals, we'll finally defect and hand maybe a minority government or a limited mandate to the Conservatives. But at the end of the day, we're a nation of progressives and we're always gonna default back to the Liberals. And that's just the way it's always been since, you know, Wilfrid Laurier in 1895. And a lot of people within the Conservative Party believe that.

And that means you don't lean too hard into conservatism. You don't talk about wanting a majority. Harper had very successfully won two back-to-back minorities. Maybe they just needed another minority. Byrne doesn't see things that way at all. Byrne believes that fortune favors the bold. And her sense was that there is more of a market for conservatism than the elites in the party understand.

There is more trust in Harper. Harper's built up trust over the years. Ordinary rank and file voters trust him in a way that elites in the party don't understand. And if they go out there and they ask for majority, voters will give it to them. And so instead of hiding their majority government ambitions, they actually went out and announced those ambitions

every chance they got. On the grounds that asking for a majority is asking for stability in the sense that that would resonate with voters who are rocked by the 2008 financial crisis. It was a big bet and it paid off quite remarkably. And friends, I have to say it, a strong, stable, national,

majority, conservative government. Yeah, I remember they campaigned a lot in ethnically diverse suburbs, small towns. It was a big, big win. But then, of course, let's fast forward to 2015. She is still campaign director and they lost decisively to the Liberals. This was Trudeau's first win. In your article you describe her as dialing up the harshness during that campaign at a time when Canadians were suddenly interested in what Trudeau was offering them which was you know sunny ways. That campaign for the Conservatives I, was best remembered for promising to create a barbaric cultural practices niche line. A re-elected Conservative government will also commit to establishing an RCMP tip line

so that citizens and victims can call with information about incidents of barbaric cultural practices here in Canada, or to notify authorities that a child or a woman is at risk of being victimized. After that loss, Byrne was really a persona non grata in conservative circles, and she sought the support of old friends. One of those friends was Erin O'Toole, who later went on to become conservative leader for a time. And tell me briefly about that friendship, how close they appear to have been, and how that changed over time. Yeah, it was a very close friendship. She helped him win the by-election that brought him into caucus in 2012. He was amazed by her skills as a campaigner. She would come and visit the families,

the O'Toole family house in Curtis, Ontario, the kids, the O'Toole kids referred to her as Aunt Jenny. It was a very, very close relationship. And when Harper lost that 2015 election to Justin Trudeau, Byrne suddenly found herself cast out of federal politics. The fact of the matter is, is that in terms of the barbaric cultural practices or the kneecap debate, the campaign had absolutely no choice but to, to, to speak on it. The prime minister had no choice but to speak because the court, there was a court ruling midway through the campaign. And O'Toole helped her get a job at a Toronto consultancy. And she figured that at some point, he would probably offer her a way back into politics consultancy. And she figured that at some point he would

probably offer her a way back into politics. Politics is what she'd known all her life, and she wanted to get back in. O'Toole announced his intention to run for leader of the party. It's not quite clear what conversations they had about what role she would play in his leadership bid. Some people say that he offered her the chance to run his leadership bid. Other people say that he merely consulted with her. At some point though, he gets cold feet. A journalist asks him if Jenny Byrne is involved in his leadership campaign. And he says that she's not, and this feels like a betrayal to Jenny Byrne.

The reason I think that, that he did this was because Byrne's name carried a lot of the baggage of the Harper years. The vibe had shifted in Canada. Canadians were wanting a kind of sunnier, more aspirational style of politics. And there was a sense that the sort of dourness in the angriness of the Harper year, that sense of dourness and angriness had really cost them. And Byrne was sort of associated with that brand. So she was off brand. And I think that's why O'Toole decided to distance himself from her. But then he did it again when he ran for leader again in 2020.

And that time I think was a bridge too far. Right, he distanced himself from her again. That's right. Right, and so that relationship became fracture, right? In the worst possible way. As we all know, O'Toole became leader that he won his second leadership bid, went up against Justin Trudeau in the 2021 election,

did quite well, won the popular vote, but ended up losing the seat count to Justin Trudeau. Over the past 36 days, we have demonstrated to Canadians that we've set out on a path to engage more Canadians in our conservative movement. One that addresses is the challenges of today while advancing the dreams of tomorrow. Ours is a conservatism that dwells not in the past, but learns from it to secure the future.

And there was the real question of whether O'Toole would stay on as leader of the party. And Byrne began campaigning behind the scenes to take him out, effectively calling up MPs, aligning a sort of anti-O'Toole faction. And their goal, she wasn't the only person doing this, but she was one of them. And their goal was to make the party ungovernable. Every time there would be a caucus meeting, people, MPs would just be coming up to the microphones, tearing strips off of Aaron O'Toole.

And there was this sense, even among people who liked him, that like, we can't do this anymore. The pain is only gonna stop when Ayrnottoul is gone. And so when they finally had their leadership review, he lost decisively. 62% said he had to go. I stepped down as leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition and leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He faced mounting criticism about shifting positions on the carbon tax,

balanced budgets, and assault-style firearms in the campaign. Some conservatives say he lost that election by every measure. Some of the people who voted against him didn't even mind him, but they just needed to move on and she'd really helped orchestrate this insurgency against him. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings filled with a white lethal powder, anthrax. But what's strange is if you ask people now what happened with that story,

almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know? From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the Anthrax killer, available now. So after O'Toole is out, enter Poliev, right? And in 2022, Poliev asked her to run his campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party, which he won in a landslide. She has been advising his campaign for prime minister since then. She has played, I think, arguably, but probably just factually, the key role behind the scenes. Yeah, and how do you see the Bern hallmarks in his campaign?

So there are a number of things. One of them is the extreme message discipline. You see all of the different MPs and writing presidents, all reading from the same book, all reciting the same slogans, avoiding hot button cultural issues, avoiding running their mouths on Twitter about hot button culture issues that could get them in trouble. You see an incredible degree of campaign discipline

that I think is being enforced from the top down. You see a very, very robust organizational kind of structure. The party has had MPs lined up in writings across the country for years, which meant that they could taunt Justin Trudeau with opposition motions and confidence bills, knowing that they were ready for an election. And then you see this real laser focus on the grievances of ordinary Canadians.

Yeah. Cost of living, the border, housing. And of course, until a few months ago, a lot of these strategies were working beautifully, right? A poly of win was seen as basically inevitable, but now many pollsters think that the liberals are headed for a majority. Last month, a number of conservatives close to the campaign anonymously spoke to the CBC and the Globe about

what they describe as a dysfunctional and disorganized campaign, which is interesting given what you have laid out today. Some describe an environment ruled by fear and belittling treatment, which I suppose is less, less surprising. Yeah. Um, yeah. And so many of the fingers are being pointed at

Byrne here. Uh, they said that power was too centralized and that she had been too unwilling to pivot the messaging when the circumstances on the ground changed. And just talk to me a little bit more about how those allegations line up with the picture that you got to burn over the years and when you were reporting this out. So yeah, I said before that she's hyper organized and she is hyper organized in the sense of making sure that all the, you know, that you have people set up in the different writings,

that you have all the data about the different writings, you have the bank accounts are full. She doesn't play well with other people and imagine you spent your whole life being told that you were wrong when you turned out to be right. That probably would lead you to be maybe a bit less generous or a bit less magnanimous.

And so when people disagree with her, there can be a huge degree of dysfunction. And this was a big problem back in 2015 when Harper ran for reelection as well. So I do take those claims about dysfunction, organizational dysfunction, and in-fighting very seriously. I think that is absolutely happening. I think people feel bullied and belittled.

I think MPs feel that they are expected to speak when they're told to speak and say what they're told to say. And if they step out of line, they get humiliated. And then Burns' Achilles heel is a kind of lack of nimbleness. The moment has changed. And Burns' strategy, which worked so, so well in 2023 and 2024, suddenly isn't able to meet the moment in 2025. And Bern, and it seems Poliev, don't quite have the nimbleness to get there.

And of course, so many of the criticisms we have heard of this campaign so far is that they have not sufficiently pivoted to Trump, right, to addressing arguably the number one issue that voters are seized with, I wanted to ask you, so one major conservative power broker and campaign strategist, Corey Tenik,

who just ran Doug Ford's election campaign has been leveling extraordinary criticism at the campaign. Last week he accused them of- Blowing a 25 point lead and being like 10 points down is campaign malpractice at the highest level. And I'm sorry to have to point that out, conservatives, but that is the actual reality. He's been going on about how they were too slow to pivot,

about how Poliev is too Trumpy, and actually in a very extraordinary move, just before we came in to have this conversation, Doug Ford doubled down. As for Corey, I've said right from day one, he's tough as nails, but he's the best campaign manager in the country, and to be very frank, if Corey was running that campaign,

I don't think Mr. Poliev would be in the position he's in right now. But there's still a lot of time left. We still have debates at the end of the day. The people will decide which way they want this country to move forward, but sometimes the truth hurts. When you hear comments like that coming from fellow conservatives, what's running through your head?

I think Corey tonight is trying to ring the alarm bells because he's hoping people inside the Poliev camp are going to listen to him because he wants Poliev to win, right? I didn't talk to Cory tonight for this piece, but I've talked to him in the past, and my sense of him is he is all about nimbleness. And I think Doug Ford, who he has worked with all through Doug Ford's premiership, is an incredibly nimble politician,

a person who can really meet the moment and shift. He can be a kind of populist attack dog one moment, and then COVID-19 hits, is incredibly nimble politician, a person who can really meet the moment and shift. He can be a kind of populist attack dog one moment and then COVID-19 hits and suddenly he's a national father figure. Toneik believes deeply in kind of shifting to meet the moment and he is, I think, appalled at the inability of the Poliev campaign to do that. And one of the incidents that he talked about is this incident in which Poliev sort of bullied a journalist named Laura Stone.

She asked him a question about his rally sizes and he did the thing that he always does where he sort of turns the question onto the journalist and tries to sort of humiliate her. How many people do you think we had last night? Thousands. Well, that's pretty obvious. I think you can be more precise than that. I don't, I mean, the party said 10,000 registered, there's reports of 15. I really can't say. One last question. When was the last time we had a rally that big?

And there's something about that, this sort of slightly oily, smarmy kind of affect, this man humiliating this woman in public that really doesn't land for a lot of voters. And Polio is already underwater with women voters. But here's the thing. And so so so according to like, you know, points to this incident as an example of what the problem is this inability to shift this inability to kind of meet the moment or convince the people who are still skeptical. You know, how many how many questions did he get on Laura Stone? Like and and and look, you know, gross, like it was gross. And he is losing women and losing women massively. And if you want to know why, go and watch that clip.

I would add to that that part of the problem for Paul Yev is that those kinds of stunts where you go and humiliate a journalist, those are part of his appeal, right? Like they give him that sort of virality. He's been doing this for as long as he's been leader of the opposition and they give him a kind of electricity to him and they give him a kind of virality that has made him very popular among a certain demographic. They also make him toxic to another demographic

and this is the sort of conundrum of Pierre Balliet's. Yeah, and I think right now, you you know a lot of people might look at that and it just it might remind them of someone south of the border too which is not the time for that for a lot of Canadians. Is it fair to say that the campaign is not pivoting, right? It's like, Poliev is having, with the exception of maybe that one, more conciliatory exchanges with reporters. He is trying, it seems, to present softer sides of himself and address criticisms that he's too angry

or negative. For example, I heard him do this the other week on what was a pretty uncritical interview on the Ben Mulroney show, but he essentially said that he's just very passionate about... What is happening to our people. When I meet young people who can't afford a home, or I meet an elderly couple that say they, they're choosing between, um, their grocery budget and their heating bill. It upsets me because it, I know it's so unnecessary.

And so sometimes that can come out, uh, as hostility, but what it is. That he's not angry. Uh, Paulie has put forward, uh, recently a set of concrete plans on how he would deal with Trump, uh, that he would move to renegotiate USMCA immediately after the election or are these not pivots in some way? No, there, there have been some, there have been some attempts to pivot. I think there are two problems here.

I think one is that he's worked so hard to establish a certain kind of combative tone that I don't think it always reads as sincere when he's worked so hard to establish a certain kind of combative tone That I don't think it always reads as sincere when he suddenly Pivots to something that feels more conciliatory I think a second problem is that he's not always pivoting as frequently or as well as maybe he could I don't think it comes Naturally to him And then I think a third problem is even to the extent that poly of is able to go out there and say that say all The right things I think there's some wariness about the Poliev coalition. One of his incredible strengths, and Jenny Byrne has helped him with this, is building

out the conservative coalition. Not just normie, older conservatives, but a younger, edgier, more online demographic of young men, which has really enabled him. It helps explain why he had these phenomenal leads in 2023 and 2024, because he was building out the coalition. But I think sometimes we're looking at some of those younger, angrier men who spend a lot of time online and we're a little wary of that aspect of the coalition and voters think like, to what extent are these people too much in the mix?

So I think there's also the problem of his audiences, which he's cultivated and which he's now a little bit stuck with. Am I right to say you weren't able to talk to Jenny Byrne about all of this stuff? I was not. Have you gotten any feedback? I remember when your piece dropped, it was the last couple of weeks,

and I mean, it was really making the rounds. Quite a few people brought it up to me. Have you gotten any feedback? Not from Byrne's inner circle at all, complete silence, which doesn't actually surprise me. I mean, so many in her position actually, I think the norm is that you don't talk to the media when you're running a campaign, you don't become the story.

So it's not terribly surprising that people have not reached out. But I've certainly heard from a lot of people in the political world more broadly, and that's been really nice. Yeah, we talked about how she's found herself in the political wilderness once before. What's at stake in this election for Jenny Byrd, you think?

I think there's a real chance this could be make or break. I think if Poliev wins, she could be one of the most senior people in his government, and that would be huge. If Poliev loses, I don't know if there's a road back. The baggage of the Harper years really cost her. If Polieff loses, I don't know if there's a road back. The baggage of the Harper years really cost her. It took a long, long time for her to get back. Took six years for her to get back into federal politics

after the Harper years because she seemed off brand. And I suspect that if Polieff loses, there's gonna be some soul searching and there're gonna be some questions about the brand. Was this brand too toxic? Was it too divisive? Did it fail to reach undecided voters, including women voters? And I don't think those conversations are going to go well for her.

Okay. Simon, this was a pleasure to have you on today. Likewise, Jamie. I love the show. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming by. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to cbc.ca slash podcasts.