For months, the front-runners in Ottawa’s mayoral race have been campaigning in high gear with teams of professional staff working behind them, many with long resumés in provincial and federal politics.
They’re Conservatives and Liberals and New Democrats. Some work for top-flight public relations firms. With no other big elections on the horizon at Queen’s Park or on Parliament Hill, more of them have the time to jump into the municipal arena.
“In Ottawa, there’s a lot of politicos with time on their hands,” said Dan Arnold, chief strategy officer at Pollara Strategic Insights, who also teaches a course on election campaigns at Carleton University. “This is the biggest game for the next little while.”
He says a sophisticated team means more sophisticated tactics. So far, the mayoral race has seen attention-grabbing policy announcements, from ripping out all parking pay stations to building a village of tiny homes. The teams are using campaign surrogates to go on the attack while keeping their candidate’s hands clean.
Some are going to great lengths to dig up dirt on their rivals, a dark art known as opposition research.
Arnold said a municipal campaign — where there are no party labels — is a perfect chance for those operators to innovate. He said it can be a sort of playground, a “fantasy land” for political staff to test new ideas.
“These people we’re talking about here are very creative political operatives,” he said. “A lot of them probably had these ideas in the back of their mind for five or 10 years and said, ‘Oh gee, I wish I had a campaign where I could do this.’ And you know, they’ve got the opportunity to do it now. They’re not going to hold back.”
So who are the people behind those efforts? CBC took a look at the aides, organizers and advisers behind each of the four leading mayoral campaigns in Ottawa to see who’s whispering in the candidates’ ears.
Sutcliffe’s team
For his successful 2022 campaign, Mark Sutcliffe relied on a circle of advisers from Liberal and Conservative politics, from the government relations sphere and from the business community.
Some key people are back for his re-election run as part of a campaign committee with roughly 20 members. His team is keeping the names close to their chests, though they revealed two when pressed by CBC.
Brendan McGuinty, a former chief of staff to former Ottawa mayor Bob Chiarelli, and the brother of former Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and current federal cabinet minister David McGuinty, is on the committee. He has also worked as a consultant and lobbyist and has close links with the business community, having served as the chair of the Ottawa Board of Trade and as a director of Invest Ottawa.
Kate Harrison is one of the 20 or so people on Mark Sutcliffe’s campaign committee, which campaign co-manager Brett Byers says plays an advisory role. (CBC)
Another committee member is Kate Harrison, a partner with public affairs firm Summa Strategies who has links to conservative organizations like the Canada Strong and Free Network and the Manning Foundation. She’s also a regular pundit on national political news broadcasts, including on CBC.
The campaign says McGuinty and Harrison play an advisory role. The day-to-day operations are mostly in the hands of people who have taken leaves of absence from their jobs at the mayor’s office at city hall.
Brett Byers and DG Stringer are campaign co-managers. Byers was an executive assistant to Rideau-Jock Coun. David Brown until last year when he moved to the mayor’s office as director of policy.
This election will be a chance for a rematch against another political operator. Byers managed PC MPP Jeremy Roberts’s 2022 re-election campaign. Roberts lost to the NDP’s Chandra Pasma, whose campaign manager Stephen Yardy is now running Jeff Leiper’s mayoral bid.
Brett Byers is one of the campaign co-managers running Mark Sutcliffe’s re-election bid for Ottawa mayor. (Francis Ferland/CBC)
Stringer is on leave from his role as Sutcliffe’s principal secretary. Before that, he worked for the government relations firm Compass Rose after leaving policy and advisory roles with Liberal ministers of Global Affairs and Canadian Heritage.
It isn’t his first time in the mayor’s office: He also worked for former mayor Jim Watson from 2014 to 2018.
Abacus Data is the Sutcliffe team’s pollster and its CEO David Coletto is supporting the campaign personally and calls Sutcliffe a friend.
Sutcliffe’s team has declined to provide a full list of senior staff and has not offered a coherent rationale for its refusal.
But CBC has been able to piece together some of its makeup. Rachel Bender Kerbel, also on leave from the mayor’s office, is doing communications. The campaign’s director of field operations is Mick Mariani, who is an assistant to Conservative MP Kelly McCauley.
Communication firm Spark Advocacy is also working on the campaign.
Leiper’s team
Many, though not all, of the key names on Jeff Leiper’s campaign team have a foot in NDP politics.
Stephen Yardy leads the team as campaign manager. He’s a former staffer on Parliament Hill who has worked on election campaigns for the NDP across Canada, including heading a provincial election campaign for the party in New Brunswick.
He’s the one looking to win another contest against Byers after guiding Pasma to victory in Ottawa West-Nepean. Yardy is currently a director at PAA Advisory, a government relations and communications firm.
The deputy campaign manager is a former federal Liberal staffer, Matthew Larventz, who also works with Yardy at PAA.
Jeff Leiper, centre, poses with his campaign team at a rally in September. Campaign manager Stephen Yardy is third from right. (Jeff Leiper campaign)
Leiper’s communications director is Tessa Franklin, who is on leave from Coun. Ariel Troster’s office and also worked on Heather McPherson’s NDP leadership campaign.
Heather Badenoch, who runs a public relations firm focused on non-profits and was Catherine McKenney’s press secretary when they ran for mayor, is also on the communications team.
Another communications team member is Sadie Cann, a former Liberal staffer, while Andrew Tumilty worked on Liberal campaigns and headed the war room for John Tory’s 2018 re-election bid for Toronto mayor.
Leiper’s field director is Katy de Sousa, who has worked on past NDP campaigns and is on the executive of the party’s Ottawa Centre riding association.
Her team, which handles door-knocking and organizes volunteers, also includes NDP organizer David Simon and a co-ordinator from the U.K. Labour Party, Alex Anstruther.
Franklin said the campaign also has a pollster but is not disclosing who it is.
Lawson’s team
When Alex Lawson first announced his candidacy for mayor, his campaign shared a roster of aides and advisers that included heavyweight names like Fred Delorey, who managed the federal Conservative campaign in the 2021 election, and Ontario Proud founder Jeff Ballingall.
Arnold said rolling out big names can be a way of showing credibility for a nascent campaign.
“You’re trying to show that you’re a real campaign, that you’ve got serious organizers behind yourself, and that’s probably why some of those names were floated earlier in the cycle,” he said.
But it turns out that neither Delorey nor Ballingall are currently working on the campaign in an active capacity, Lawson’s communications director Laura Kurkimaki confirmed. She said former Liberal staffer Kyle Harrietha is still providing advice, but is not involved in day-to-day operations.
That leaves a core team that nonetheless has significant political experience. Lawson’s half-brother, Emrys Graefe, is his campaign manager.
Graefe was deputy director of Stephen Harper’s 2015 campaign and digital director for Maxime Bernier during his 2017 run to lead the federal Conservatives. He then founded the libertarian group Conservative Futures.
He has worked in staff positions for at least two MPs and for the Conservative Senate caucus. He has also held senior staff roles in the Conservative Party itself, including deputy director of political operations. On a provincial level, he headed the digital campaign for Doug Ford’s PC leadership run and for the party’s 2018 general election campaign.
Graefe later moved to government relations firms, first at Rubicon Strategy and then as co-founder of Political Intelligence. The other co-founder, Mainstreet Research CEO Quito Maggi, is Lawson’s campaign chair and is doing opinion polling for his run.
Mainstreet Research CEO Quito Maggi is the chair of Alex Lawson’s mayoral campaign and is doing polling work for the team. He is seen here outside the Elections Ottawa office on the day Lawson registered to run. (Arthur White-Crummey/CBC)
Kurkimaki is also heavily involved in Lawson’s campaign. She’s currently a senior vice-president at Vantage, another government relations firm, and also has a long history in Conservative politics.
She was principal secretary to Erin O’Toole during part of his tenure as leader of the opposition, and his deputy national campaign manager during the 2021 campaign. She previously worked in the Prime Minister’s Office in issues management under Stephen Harper.
Said Said, a close friend of Lawson’s, is the volunteer co-ordinator, while Ryan Husk is the field operations lead. He has worked with Ottawa Bluesfest and with several unions, currently at Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.
Cameron Bonesso is advising the campaign. He has worked for former Conservative MP David Yurdiga and now runs his own public relations company. He’s also running for trustee for the Ottawa Catholic School Board.
Saravanamuttoo’s team
Some of Neil Saravanamuttoo’s campaign team was involved in his past advocacy work, while others share his deep roots in the federal government.
Co-campaign manager Erin Maher founded Parkways for People along with Saravanamutoo to promote active transportation on the National Capital Region’s parkway network. She also worked with him on the campaign against the Lansdowne 2.0 project.
The other campaign co-manager, Aidan Anderson, was previously campaign manager for former MP and MLA Kent Hehr’s unsuccessful 2025 bid for Calgary city council.
Aidan Anderson is co-chair of Neil Saravanamuttoo’s mayoral campaign. (Arthur White-Crummey/CBC)
He is also a director-at-large with the Ottawa Centre Provincial Liberal Association and an associate consultant with Megaphone Communications.
Rob Patzer is volunteer co-ordinator and policy adviser. He has one of the longest resumés on the campaign team, previously holding senior roles at Environment and Climate Change Canada, Global Affairs Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Ali Rahman, who previously worked at the University of Ottawa and now runs a communications company, is communications lead.
Rounding out Saravanamuttoo’s senior team is Debra Hauer as outreach lead, Anne Gardiner as events lead and Laurent Gonzalez as field lead.