The Decibel - The strategists inside the Liberal and Conservative war rooms

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

On April 28, Canadians will vote in a new federal government. Voters have gotten to know the front-runners – Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader Mark Carney … but what about the people steering them?With a week left, we’re looking at the people running this election’s leading campaigns – and the strategies driving the Liberal and Conservative war rooms in this tight race.The Globe’s senior reporter Stephanie Levitz will introduce us to the strategists, advisors and campaign directors trying to win your vote – and the challenges both parties are facing in the process.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

In this campaign, we've learned a lot about the election's two frontrunners, conservative leader Pierre Polyev and liberal leader Mark Carney. But the people behind those campaigns aren't as well known. In a federal election, the players in the political war rooms have a huge amount of power. They help shape the campaign's message, what we hear from the leader, and how we end up seeing the parties. So today, Stephanie Levitz is here.

She's a senior reporter in the Globe's Ottawa Bureau. She'll take us into the conservative and liberal war rooms, introduce us to the key players helping craft the campaigns, and talk about the challenges they're facing. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Stephanie, thanks so much for being here.

My pleasure. So before we look at the liberal or conservative campaigns, can we just start by looking at this term war room? Like, when we say that, what are we talking about? What exactly is a war room? So a war room is a catch-all term, right? It's used for the physical space, and now I think increasingly also the digital space, that

is used to help campaigns plan what they're trying to do. And so obviously, their ultimate objective in the context of the liberals and the conservatives to win this election. So that's getting out the vote. That's every day's message event. That's figuring out where the photo ops are. That's managing candidate relations.

Candidate in writing X wants to do an interview or something like that. It's deploying the lawn signs. It's signing up volunteers. It's raising the money. So when you say war room, sometimes it's imagining generals with big maps on the table, moving little figurines to say, okay, and this will be the front and that'll be this. Think of that, but with whiteboards and sticky notes and computer screens and text messages and all of these things that go into literally shaping a campaign strategy and rolling out a national campaign.

Okay. Yeah. You paint a good picture here. So the white boards, the computers, the Tim Hortons cups, probably, everyone kind of gathered around deciding what's going on then. A lot of pizza boxes, I am certain, and a lot of take-out food containers. Okay, so let's actually look at these war rooms then. I wanna start with the conservatives.

Who's at the top here, Stephanie? Who is steering Pierre Poliev's campaign? I mean, it's important to understand the person steering Pierre Poliev's campaign? I mean, it's important to understand the person steering Pierre Poliev's campaign is Pierre Poliev. He is intimately involved in shaping many elements of this campaign, maybe less so the down and dirty daily stuff, get out the vote or candidate, you know, messaging and things. But the overarching narrative that I think we should go here, I think we should do this,

I think we should make this announcement today. He really drives the bus for that. And underneath him, he has some allies, one in particular being a woman by the name of Jenny Byrne, who has worked very closely by his side for the last number of years, basically since he launched his bid to run the party, the Conservative Party, in 2022. And she is really the second-in-command general, if we're going to continue with this war room analogy, where together, the two of them actualize his vision for how

to win this campaign and her vision, which is informed by decades at this point, of ground game conservative operations, both at the campaign level, inside the halls of power, so in the prime minister's office, in the Harper years, and really bringing all of that expertise to bear to help them win. Okay, yeah, let's talk a little bit more about Jenny Byrne

because it does sound like she is really involved in directing what's going on here. So can you tell us a little bit more about her experience? What has she been doing in conservative circles? Sure, I mean, Jenny Byrne, you know, has long been branded the girl from Fenland Falls, which is to say that she comes from a very small town and has never let that experience growing up as she did leave her, which informs her politics.

It informs some of the conservative ethos, which is that the party ought to be in service of everyday ordinary Canadians trying their best to make a life for themselves and make a life for their families. And everything should be about that and reaching those people and motivating them and rallying them together and ideally finding more of those people, right? Expanding the base. So it is. And eventually, you know, played a major role in the 2011 victory for the Harper Conservatives

and then the 2015 defeat for the Harper Conservatives. She left federal politics for a bit, engaged in provincial politics with Doug Ford, helped engineer one of his victories, and then went into the private sector, starting her own consulting firm to sort of lend her expertise to the business world about how to influence politics

and how to influence government. Okay, and so it actually sounds like she came up in the parties around the same time that Pierre Pollyet was also doing the same, right? So they knew each other, I guess, from that time. They very much grew up together. They're very tightly aligned. And her and Poliev, besides being roughly the same age and having grown up, were also

in a romantic relationship together for a number of years. And so have a familiarity. For over a decade, actually, like quite a while. For quite a while. So, you know, clearly have a friendship that is deep and profound. And so that's sometimes why people refer to them as having a bit of the same brain, because they're just so closely linked. Okay, so we've got Pierre Poliev, we've got Jenny Byrne as his kind of general there.

Who else would you say is important in shaping Poliev's strategy here? It's less so strategy and more so messaging, you know, like who helps him come up with the lines, come up with the language, you know, the speeches that he gives. Mr. Polly was famous for prior to this campaign for sure, never really reading from notes, right? He would just go off and claim in rallies and it was pretty remarkable. But he has people around him that helped that, right? And one of those people is Matt Wolfe, who has been a conservative operative again for a very long time. He worked very closely with Jason Kenney in Alberta when Kenney was the premier and embroiled in a lot of divisive and

difficult politics during the pandemic. Matt Wolfe is not without controversy for how he's chosen to deploy his messaging, you know, attacks online, going right after the detractors, looking people that they don't agree with like right in the eye, virtually, I suppose, and telling them where to go. Mr. Poliev does some of that. And so Matt sort of helps frame that. He helps frame the arguments when you when you hear, you know, the spin, that's Matt. How do we take this thing that just happened in the debate to our opponent, to our rivals? And how do we shape that? How do we respond to that? How do we deal with that? You know, Matt Wolfe plays a part in that. When we think of Poliev, we also think about those catchy slogans. The lost liberal decade, Canada first for a change.

Boots not suits! Boots not suits! Boots not suits! Is this something that Matt Wolfe would have a hand in, or do we know? That's Poliev. That's Poliev. That would be Poliev. Very interesting. Yeah, he really does a lot of his own writing, a lot of his own scripting, a lot of his own. have a hand in or do we know? That's Poliev. That's Poliev. That would be Poliev. Very interesting. Yeah, he really does a lot of his own writing, a lot of his own scripting, a lot of his own. And you know, for people who are interested in Mr. Poliev has sprouted this to a degree.

You can go back to Mr. Poliev years ago on the floor of the House of Commons in committee using a lot of the same rhetorical devices and flourishes that he deploys now. It's just that back then he didn't have the same kind of audience. Wow. Okay, so we've got Jenny Byrne, he didn't have the same kind of audience. Wow. Okay, so we've got Jenny Byrne, we've got Matt Wolfe kind of helping Poliev shape how this campaign is going. I think it's interesting that something that they've really had to contend with

are comparisons between Poliev and Donald Trump. So I wanna ask you about this, Stephanie, because Poliev's opponents have compared him to Trump for, you know, since the start of the campaign. Carney did that close to the beginning, actually. Pierre Pauliev's approach for division sounds familiar, doesn't it? That's because, as Premier Smith said,

and I quote, Pierre Pauliev is very much in sync with President Trump. And of course, this is because Trump is very unpopular right now in Canada. So how have they dealt with these comparisons? They flat out reject them. I mean, that's the starting point, right? I am not Donald Trump.

I don't espouse his worldview. I don't believe in the things he says. You know, it's interesting because Mr. Trump so aggressively came after Canada. That's the point of demarcation for Mr. Poliev. He's focused on that, right? I am here to protect Canada. I have no interest in joining the US. Here are my policies to make us stronger.

The reason Trump is attacking us is because the liberals have made it so weak. Those are sort of the overarching lines of his argument. In the last week or so, there's another thing happening with Poliev as he tries to fend off this linkage that his rivals are trying to make. And that is demonstrating a more personal, softer side of himself to really juxtapose against Donald Trump. Because part of the criticism that's levied at him is not that his policies are Trump-like, because they're not.

It's that he sounds like Trump, that his affect is like Trump, that he reminds people of Trump. And that's in some of the bombast and some of the flair and the hyperbole that he uses. So now you're seeing him doing these podcasts, these lengthy ones, where he talks much more about his ideas, his ideology, also his family, his children, to build him out, to remove him from being a caricature, which is how his rivals are trying to portray him, and showing him as a three-dimensional figure who, when you look at him from all sides, really is the argument they're trying to put forward is that he is not like Trump.

There's no Trump-like anything about him from their perspective. Yeah. And then of course I would say that we've seen him in recent weeks, you know, talk about the size of his rallies. There were a bigger rally than that. You would know about it. I think so. But I think it was pretty incredible.

Any of you there? Yes. Magic, eh? Wow. So I imagine, you know, statements like that don't really help the argument of him trying to distance himself from Trump because that's a very Trumpian thing to do. That's exactly it, right? And that's where people, we get to go a bit chicken and an egg here on this, right?

Oh, he's just trying to import Trump politics and Trump. Mr. Poliev has always been like this. This is some of the vibe of how he's always spoken. And it's challenging. One of Mr. Poliev's strengths as he built the base of the party, expanded the base of the party is a degree of authenticity. He is what you get. There's nothing else. There's no secret backdoor to Mr. Poliev, right? His public facing persona has always been the same. And it so happens that His public-facing persona has always been the same. And it so happens that that public-facing persona

has an echo now of Trumpian color. And so, yeah, when he does stuff like that, it would be risky for people to assume that that's strategic in the sense of, well, it worked for Trump, so it's gonna work for me, as opposed to it's just how he engages. Now, I say all of that, but it's also worth pointing out, and I think it's going to work for me as opposed to it's just how he engages. Now I say all of that, but it's also worth pointing out and I think it's important. You know, the Trump one era that those years, a lot of conservatives on side with that,

you know, there are pictures of Jenny Byrne wearing a MAGA hat, for example, that circulate on the internet. So this is his first term in Trump's first term. Yeah, Trump won. Like in Trump's first term. And there's a tension for the conservatives because clearly Trump too is not Trump one, very different. The direct attacks on Canada, this trade war, threats to our sovereignty.

People are recoiling from that, you know, aggressively and viscerally. But within the conservative movement, and I don't mean party, I don't mean the people that Poliev is directly responsible for, in the movement, there are people that still look at that, look at some of the things Trump is doing, at least the overarching point of them,

if not the mechanics of them, and say, I like that. I don't think that's wrong. I don't think that's bad. And so for Mr. Poliev, those are his voters too. So you don't want to disparage Trump. You don't want to mock him. You don't want to just go all the way the other way, and then people say, oh, you're afraid to look like Donald Trump.

It's just a weird tension for him. That's very hard to solve for. Last point on the conservative, Stephanie, I want to ask you about infighting within the party, because you're the start of the race. I know you spoke to a number of conservative party insiders who weren't happy with the campaign. And recently we've seen some pretty strong criticism, honestly, from Corey Tanaiq, who is Ontario Premier Doug Ford's strategist. How has this public disagreement affected the Poliev campaign?

A lot of family dirty laundry is getting aired in public. And there have always been tensions in the conservative movement, different factions warring for power, warring for control. With Mr. Tanik just so spectacularly decide to air some of these grievances publicly, I mean, first he did it at a speech in Toronto in front of political types and business leaders. with Mr. Sinaiq just so spectacularly decide to air some of these grievances publicly. I mean, first he did it at a speech in Toronto in front of political types and business leaders. Then he repeated it almost double down on the Curse of Politics podcast. Blowing a 25-point lead and being like 10 points down is campaign malpractice at the highest level.

You know, the pressure being, of course, on Mr. Poliev that you're running the wrong campaign, that this should be a campaign that is only about Donald Trump. Everything should be framed in that context. That's how Doug Ford won again. And that's running up against, to go back to Jenny and Pierre and their strong belief that this campaign is a cost of living, affordability election for Canadians. So you can't always be talking about Trump. You have to say to people, I want to be your prime minister

and here are the things I'm going to do to fix the last 10 years. So there's that tension that they're trying to manage against. They have definitely reframed some of their campaigning to be more viscerally against Donald Trump. And then also they haven't, but there's that top level fight with Cory Tenik.

And then you have this grassroots level pressure that's happening with Mr. Poliev as they've chosen to disregard the nomination process in a number of writings and parachute in handpicked candidates. And that's really rankled a lot of grassroots conservatives. And there's, you know, the high profile one is Mike DeYoung, former BC cabinet minister, who was campaigned for the party's nomination for like a year,

told the absolute last minute, sorry, we don't want you. To a lot of people, they look at that and go, what's that? Why are you controlling this, Pierre, Jenny, other operatives in Ottawa? I thought we were supposed to be the party of the grassroots. I thought we were supposed to respect what the writings wanted. It's not just happening in Abbotsford. It's happening in other writings in the lower mainland, writings in Ontario. And what's challenging is that you need these grassroots conservatives to pull the vote for you, to give you your money, to campaign for you. And if you add up all these little writings where you really upset people, you lose their

willingness to campaign for you in a closely contested election. That stuff matters. We'll be back in a moment. All right, so Stephanie, that's the conservative side of things. Let's turn to the liberals now. Who is running the liberal war room? So at the top of the, let's say, war room food chain is a fellow by the name of Andrew Bevin.

And Andrew Bevin, again, a long career in liberal politics. He was Kathleen Wynne's chief of staff, former Ontario liberal premier. He then came into federal politics when he joined Krista Freeland as her chief of staff. And at the time, Ms. Freeland was the finance minister and he worked hand in glove with her to try and shape the government's fiscal strategy,

as well as its messaging on its fiscal strategy. One of the things Mr. Bevin was credited for was, you know, one of the last budgets, Freeland delivered. The communications around that budget were perceived to be some of the strongest the liberals had had throughout their governance. They were leaking announcements before. They were really ginning up excitement. There was a lot of, you know, it felt like there was forward momentum for the government

all of a sudden. That was all attributed to Andrew Bevin. So as you know, in the fall of last year, things were looking very grim for the Trudeau liberals and their campaign director, he walked away saying that he didn't have the energy in him to fight another campaign. In came Andrew Bevin. He was deployed over there. So he's part of a team now guiding the Carney campaign. I want to ask you about another one of Carney's main advisors, which is Gerald Butz. This might be a name that's familiar to people because he was actually a very close advisor to former Prime Minister Trudeau for a number of years.

So what's his role in this campaign, Stephanie? Maybe, you know, look at Jerry Butz as like the chief Carney whisperer, a job that he also did for Justin Trudeau. I mean, a distinction, I think, between the two men is that Mr. Butts and Mr. Trudeau went to university together. They were long-time personal friends. So again that level of sort of intimacy and awareness of how a brain works and how a person works you know was there during the Trudeau years. For Mr. Carney it's a bit I think there's a bit more remove although they've traveled in similar circles for a very long time. And he's the one you know sort of licking his fingers sticking it in the air and saying,

okay, where are things going? Where should we land? What kind of message is going to stick? How do we get him to resonate with voters? That's really Jerry's advising capacity, the issue set, the weaknesses of the conservative party. And in some ways, I also think really helping Mr. Carney navigate the politics of running for leadership of a country, because Mr. Carney has a lot of strengths on paper.

He's had a remarkable career, but he's never done politics. Shaking hands, kissing babies. Mr. Carney was asked at some point, do you think being the prime minister is easier? And he effectively said, yeah, if I'm a candidate, I got to go like stand in a field with cows and he was referring to a photo op but that stuff's all really foreign to Kearney and you still need it you need it to win an election so that's part of Jerry's role too. Interesting okay and I guess we I should mention that people might know his name because of course as you say he was close to Trudeau he was the one in 2019

who resigned kind of took the fall for the SNC-Lavalin affair. All we ever asked the attorney general to do was to consider a second opinion. He goes kind of way back in the Trudeau government there. Yeah, and you know, not all that great, right? He was the fall guy in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Although he helped advise the liberals on subsequent campaigns, I mean, he has spoken publicly about basically breaking up with Trudeau. But Mr. Butts now has a second life in politics, or maybe a third, fourth, fifth life,

depending on how you look at the arc of his career. And is certainly trying to ignite some of the same magic for Carney that he helped ignite for Trudeau. I think this is really interesting, though, because two of these top people that we're talking about that are helping steer Carney's campaign, they were really important figures in the Trudeau government.

And Carney is continually trying to work to figures in the Trudeau government. And you know, Carney is continually trying to work to distance himself from Trudeau, right? So what do you make of that? I mean, Canada is a small country. We don't have a ton of people running around with the experience it requires to successfully execute a national campaign. People who understand the landscape, the technology.

That's part of it. Part of it is the liberal elite is the liberal elite. The people who have risen to the top of that infrastructure, they're not going to go away just because the leadership changes. It begs the question though, how far are these people willing to go to distance themselves from how things were run in the Trudeau era? Because the Trudeau era, a lot of mistakes were made, and now you have the same people who made those mistakes still in charge.

So have they learned? Have they grown? Will they do things differently? And I mean that politically, I mean it on a policy-oriented basis. And it's challenging, and this is one of the key lines of attacks for the conservatives, right?

It's challenging for folks to potentially wrap their heads around that. Because how could you have fought to the death on Policy X for 10 years? And then now you just turn around and walk away. Hmm. I want to ask you about a situation we saw just over a week ago when it comes to how the Liberal Party is maybe operating. Can you tell us a little bit about these buttons, Stephanie, that we saw at this conservative conference? What happened there?

Button gate. Okay, so there is a conference that it's held pretty much every year. And it's by an organization known as Canada Strong and Free, and which used to be known as the Manning Center after its founder, Preston Manning, the former Reform Party leader. Everyone still refers to it as the Manning Center, so that's important to know.

So at this conference, conservatives get together. This is not an officially conservative party sanctioned event. It runs parallel. It's meant to be a think tank. People get to stand around. They workshop ideas. Often these things are controversial. And at this year's conference, these buttons started popping up,

like political buttons, you know, that you might pin on your lapel. Very old school, very vintage. And one of them, you know, had Jenny Byrne's name crossed out and it was Cory Tenike. Funny. One of them, though, name crossed out and it was Cory Tenik. Funny. One of them, though, said, stop the steal. And that was a reference, of course, to the movement in the United States that believed that the last presidential election, not the most recent one, but the one before, was,

quote unquote, stolen. And in an environment where it's, oh, everyone thinks that conservatives are Trumpian, to have this button pop up fomenting that the conservative movement was trying to preemptively undercut the election result. That's really dangerous. So as political operatives sometimes do when they think they've pulled off, you know, quite the stunt, they started bragging about it. And in this instance, they were bragging about it at a bar. Also at the bar, CBC reporter

Kate McKenna, who happened to overhear liberal operatives talking about planting these buttons at a conservative conference. And, you know, a real black eye for the Carney campaign. I mean, they're trying to portray themselves that he is trying to portray himself as the adult in the room. And to have your campaign operatives out doing this kind of stuff really undercuts that message. And we should say the liberals have said they've identified and reassigned the individuals who were responsible here. But I think this is interesting to kind of give us this inside look at how some of these

things actually end up playing out when it comes to the campaign. Yeah, and campaigns are nasty business. I mean, that's part of it too, right? When Carney launched his liberal leadership campaign, somebody ordered a limo so that it would look like he was some big wig rich guy just showing up kind of thing, right? That's a campaign stunt. No one's ever claimed credit. Is it possible that it was a sanctioned something from the Poliev War Room?

We're never going to know. Campaign stunts happen. Sometimes they can be really funny. But in this instance, when the stakes are high, it just felt a bit too much. Stephanie, before I let you go, we have a week left in this campaign. If you look back at the liberals and the conservatives' overall strategies here, is there anything that stands out to you? Things that have worked really well or things maybe that haven't worked so well?

For Mr. Carney, he's had the luxury of having two hats to wear at a time of national uncertainty. And one of those hats is, of course, the leader. The other is to be the prime minister, right? And a couple of times now, they've, what they say is paused his campaign so he could go back to Ottawa and deal with pressing national business. Sometimes when political party leaders have to put on the prime ministerial hat during the campaign, it's to deal with a crisis that makes them look bad. In this instance, it has the opposite effect of making Carney look good, except he might

also be at risk of overusing that. There comes a point where it looks like, did you really need to go back to Ottawa for this cabinet meeting or are you just trying not to campaign? For Mr. Poliev, these rallies have stood out to me that he's been running and their size is notable and I think it's a remarkable testament to our democracy that that many people are willing to show up to hear a political leader. What's interesting about it though is previous iterations of the conservative party have not done those kinds of rallies and they often say they don't do them because they suck a lot of

energy away from the ground game from the volunteer door knockers like you know 10 000 people in a rally000 people in a rally or 10,000 people who aren't knocking on doors, who aren't trying to raise money, who aren't getting, you know, candidates going out to identify the vote. So that's a switch in tactic. But I guess fundamentally what's interesting about how these two campaigns have been run is something that we're seeing in one of the polls. And it's talking about hope versus fear and what is motivating people to cast a ballot. And for people who are choosing to cast a ballot for the conservatives, the motivating factor is hope. And they want, you know, a positive change for the country and believe Mr. Polyev represents that.

For people who are aligning with the liberals, they're fearful, they're worried, they're uncertain about their future and they think Mr. Carney is the person best aligned to help manage that way. That's two very distinct and very powerful emotions. And which of those two things ultimately gets more voters to the polls? Well, we'll find out on April 28th. Well, Stephanie, let's leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time.

My pleasure. That was Stephanie Lovitz, a senior reporter with The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our associate producer is Azra Souter. Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer

and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.