{"id":590873,"date":"2026-04-08T19:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T19:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/590873\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T19:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T19:38:12","slug":"poilievre-set-to-lose-communications-director-seen-as-an-agent-of-change-national","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/590873\/","title":{"rendered":"Poilievre set to lose communications director seen as an agent of change – National"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre<\/a> is about to lose his director of communications, Katy Merrifield.<\/p>\n

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Merrifield, along with Conservative campaign manager Steve Outhouse, have been widely seen within the Conservative caucus as the two most significant agents of change in the way Poilievre has been approaching politics since the Conservatives lost the 2025 election.<\/p>\n

She said the decision to depart was her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cI put a few projects on hold when I made a decision to join the leader\u2019s office last summer and it\u2019s time for me to return to them,\u201d Merrifield said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m proud of my contributions to the movement over the past year, and I will continue to support the leader, team and conservative movement long after I depart this role.\u201d<\/p>\n

Merrifield, 42, joined Poilievre\u2019s office last fall and quickly set about changing Poilievre\u2019s media strategy and communications approach. Poilievre, for example, began doing more interviews and appearances on so-called \u201clegacy media\u201d including Global News, CBC, and CTV \u2014 media that he had largely shunned from the time he won his party\u2019s leadership in 2022 to the 2025 election.<\/p>\n

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She was widely credited with convincing Poilievre to do one thing he had never done before: attend and participate in a Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner.<\/p>\n

Merrifield\u2019s last day in the Opposition Leader\u2019s Office will be Friday.<\/p>\n

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Merrifield came to Ottawa from Vancouver, where she had served as director of communications to former B.C. premier Christy Clark. She was also the executive director of communications to former Alberta premier Jason Kenney.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve known her for years and watched her career grow as she held several senior political communications roles, through which she established a reputation for working hard and getting positive results,\u201d said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe proved that again over the last year in her work with the party. She was a huge asset to the team in the war room during the campaign and was an incredible help to me in my role as immigration shadow minister.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Merrifield succeeded Ben Woodfinden, who was Poilievre\u2019s communication director from 2022 until Woodfinden resigned after the 2025 election.<\/p>\n

Typically, directors of communication in a leader\u2019s office will co-ordinate not just a leader\u2019s strategy with the media, but also supervise speech writers and, increasingly in this day and age, manage a digital communications strategy.<\/p>\n

For most of Woodfinden\u2019s tenure as manager of Poilievre\u2019s communications strategy, Poilievre and the Conservatives were ahead in the polls versus Justin Trudeau\u2019s Liberals.<\/p>\n

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And after losing to Mark Carney\u2019s Liberals in 2025, Poilievre\u2019s communication approach came under fire from many within the Conservative Party. For the first time in modern history, for example, the Conservatives did not permit the media to travel with the leader during the election campaign.<\/p>\n

Media that travelled with previous Conservative leaders and with other party leaders paid between $10,000 and $15,000 per week for a seat on a leader\u2019s election tour and were prepared to do so again with Poilievre\u2019s tour but no such opportunity existed.<\/p>\n

The sloganeering \u2014 \u201cAxe the tax,\u201d and \u201cBoots Not Suits,\u201d etc. \u2014 and some of Poilievre\u2019s brash and occasionally aggressive approaches to the media and his opponents drew comparisons to U.S. President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Woodfinden has defended the approach Poilievre took during the campaign<\/a>, noting that his \u201cmessage would resonate with people not typically expected to be Conservative voters, namely, younger Canadians and new Canadians.\u201d<\/p>\n

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And Poilievre did get more votes than any other Conservative leader ever.<\/p>\n

Merrifield, by contrast, only worked for Poilievre while he and the Conservatives were, for the most part, behind in the polls to Carney\u2019s Liberals.<\/p>\n

And while the \u201cissue set\u201d \u2014 housing, food inflation and affordability, for example \u2014\u00a0 that Poilievre emphasized did not change, his approach to talking about those issues did.<\/p>\n

The slogans disappeared and were replaced in many cases by policy speeches. The tight T-shirts of the Woodfinden era were replaced by business suits and dress shirts.<\/p>\n

Poilievre appeared on high-profile podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience but also, notably, the podcast of former CBC journalist Peter Mansbridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cKaty is incredibly talented and I sincerely appreciate all she did for our team,\u201d said Conservative MP Scott Aitchison. \u201cI am sad to see her go, but I wish her all the best and look forward to the next great things she will accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\t&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is about to lose his director of communications, Katy Merrifield. Merrifield, along with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,126155,224976,44,18277,714],"class_list":{"0":"post-590873","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-conservative-party","11":"tag-katy-merrifield","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-pierre-poilievre","14":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}