Poilievre defends campaign messaging, wants to convince more people of it

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre defended his campaign messaging and said his mission is now to find ways to sell it to more people after his party’s stinging defeat in last week’s election. In a brief address to reporters before a caucus meeting in Ottawa Tuesday, Poilievre said the election result last week was “disappointing” but argued that his messaging — which focused on affordability, housing, justice and crime — was on the mark. “You have to acknowledge that it was the generally right message. Not perfect, but the right message, because the Liberals stole multiple elements of that message,” he told reporters with a chuckle. “We have to broaden our team. We need to find ways to get our message through to a larger audience of people. We also need to show our capacity to include more people and share a message of opportunity,” he said. It was the first public address by the Conservative leader since the Liberals handed him two stinging losses in one shot, defeating the opposition party nationally and Poilievre in his long-time Ottawa-area riding of Carleton. But Poilievre appeared to reject the notion of cutting out any campaign advisors, including campaign manager Jenni Byrne. On Tuesday morning, National Post reported that Conservative MPs and insiders blamed the election loss mostly on operational and internal decisions spearheaded by Byrne. “Excluding is never the way to broader a team,” he said. “We are going to broaden our team and get our message through.” He noted that Byrne “did a lot of hard work” while noting the additional 2.3 million votes and 25 seats the Conservatives won last Monday. “We have to go further, so we’re going to be enlarging our team and that’s one of the things we’ll be talking about today in our caucus,” he argued, saying his party would be looking for an additional million supporters by next election. “We have to spend a lot of the summer listening carefully to people in the community’s coffee shops and town halls and other events,” he added. Conservative caucus members are meeting all day Tuesday in Ottawa for the first time since the end of the campaign on April 28 to discuss steps forward. That will likely include discussions about an interim leader while Poilievre waits for an opportunity to run for a new seat in Parliament. Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer said the caucus was going to have discussions on Tuesday and in the weeks and months to come to analyze the results the election, but already said he was confident that Poilievre would be making some “adjustments.” Scheer also defended Byrne work, saying she did a “great job” and managed a “fantastic team” that was able to grow the party’s seat count in many areas of the country. “There’s a lot of reasons to be encouraged and a lot of aspects to be proud of,” he said as he was entering the caucus meeting. “Obviously, we didn’t win, so we have to take a look at why and what we need to do to go forward.” More to come National Post cnardi@postmedia.com calevesque@postmedia.com

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