Article content continued

Like Harper, she is fiercely partisan and her roots in political involvement go back to her youth.

In 1997, when Harper was leaving Ottawa after three years as a Reform MP, Byrne was the 21-year-old president of the Reform party club at the University of Ottawa. She said at the time that she joined the party at age 16 because of its economic policies. She said she believed in debt reduction and tax cuts and emphasized how it was more important to her generation than to her own parents.

“It’s great for them to say don’t cut here or there, but they won’t be the ones affected by (the debt),” she told an interviewer at the time. “They’re in their late 40s and they will probably still benefit from government programs. But Canada looks like a bleak place for me by the time I’m their age.”

Nearly two decades later, Byrne is working with Harper and other senior Tories to make tax cuts a key issue in the next election.

It’s expected the government will offer tax breaks in an economic update within the next month, provide more tax cuts in a budget in February or March, and make promises of more tax cuts in the autumn 2015 campaign.

Eventually, Byrne will have to leave the PMO and move over to the Conservative party office – where she has worked before. That move is expected to occur at least a few months before the election.

Byrne’s work in politics has included some bizarre twists. She was the Conservative party’s director of political operations when a package arrived at party headquarters in Ottawa on May 29, 2012 that turned out to contain the foot of homicide victim Jun Lin. Byrne testified about the incident Monday at the first-degree murder trial of Luka Rocco Magnotta in Montreal.

mkennedy@ottawacitizen.com

Twitter.com/Mark_Kennedy_

Jenni Byrne at a glance

2006: Appointed a senior adviser to Ian Brodie, the prime minister’s chief of staff.

2009: Byrne leaves post as director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office to become director of political operations for the Conservative party.

2011: With the illness of Sen. Doug Finley, Byrne takes on his role as the Conservatives’ campaign manager for the federal election.

2014: Currently works as deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.