Senior staff meetings of the Liberal election campaign team operate nowadays under a new rule, BYON: bring your own number.

Katie Telford, the campaign chief for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, is fond of numbers. “Numbers tell stories,” she likes to say. So she wants everyone on the campaign team to show up for meetings with a number — preferably a number that tells her how the Liberals are doing.

Telford and Gerald Butts, who holds the title of senior adviser, are the two people closest to Trudeau, the two-person team he turned to in 2012 when he decided to get serious about seeking the Liberal leadership. Wherever Trudeau has gone in politics, and wherever he’s going, Telford and Butts will be close at hand.

At 37, Telford is one of the youngest people to head a Liberal campaign, and one of the rare women to be in that role. Her 4-year-old son, George, recently asked his father, Rob Silver, if “daddies could vote.” When Silver wondered why he was asking, young George replied: “Because mommies run elections.”

If you ask Butts what kind of stamp Telford has put on this Liberal campaign, he unhesitatingly follows the BYON rule and says “five million.” By the first week of September, Liberals were boasting they had knocked on five million doors across Canada since Trudeau took over the party.

“That number is her doing,” Butts says. “Katie is very tenacious and she knows how to get big things right and stick to them over time. And she absolutely believes in rebuilding the campaign from the grassroots up. When we started, there were very few grassroots.

“A lot of the campaign bears her unique stamp, but I think that idea, that this could be a movement-driven organization — and not just a bunch of people in Ottawa talking to each other through the newspaper — is really her.”

Telford keeps a far lower public profile than other top members of Team Trudeau, notably Butts, who is a spirited arguer for all things Liberal on Facebook, Twitter and with members of the press gallery. Telford declined to be interviewed for this piece.

All political campaigns have two components — the “air war” and the “ground game.” The air war is the one that most Canadians see: politics fought on the airwaves or in public opinion polls. The ground game is the one that often even pundits don’t see — the house-to-house, voter-to-voter contact in ridings.

Butts is widely seen as the air warrior. Telford is more known for attention to the ground campaign. As it happens, Telford is installed at Liberal headquarters in Ottawa while Butts is on the plane with Trudeau.

Notably, that air-ground distinction is also one that can be seen in the NDP campaign, between campaign chiefs Brad Lavigne and Anne McGrath. “Brad’s more about the air war,” McGrath says.

Butts, however, argues it is an over-simplification, even wrong, to put him and Telford in these neat categories.

“All the big decisions involve us both, whether they be strategic or operational.”

Trudeau took a bit of heat initially from long-time Liberals when he put Telford in charge of his leadership campaign. The old party hands in the party argued she was too young, not well-enough known in federal Liberal circles, too “Toronto,” too Queen’s Park. (From 2004 to 2006, she was chief of staff for Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy.)

“A lot of the usual suspects called up and said, ‘No, no, no. You need someone ‘grownup’ in charge; you need someone with a steady hand,’ ” Trudeau said in an interview a couple of years ago. He added he had an easy reply to her detractors: “Oh, OK — one of those people who’ve done so well by us in the last three election cycles.”

There was foreshadowing in that defence of Telford, specifically of what Trudeau would do once in the leader’s job — ejecting senators from the Liberal caucus, for instance, or warning longtime pro-life MPs that their views were a little less welcome than they had been in the Liberal party of old.

Telford’s presence at the top of Trudeau’s world is emblematic of his approach to shaking up the Liberal party, attempting to make it much friendlier to women, young people and new faces.

“She constantly fights against people who don’t take her seriously, who belittle her, who say they can do a better job,” Trudeau told me. Trudeau has had some experience himself, notably in attack ads by his rivals.

Telford wasn’t exactly an unknown quantity in federal politics when she emerged as Trudeau’s campaign chief in 2012. She had headed up the 2006 leadership campaign of Kennedy — the candidate, no surprise, backed by Trudeau — and she worked as a deputy chief of staff for Stéphane Dion when he was Liberal leader. In between working for Dion and Trudeau, she was a consultant at Strategy Corp. in Toronto.

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Over the years, she’s developed a few rules. Telford doesn’t like hierarchies or the fact that some Liberals (often the kind who call themselves “senior strategists”) see themselves as too high up to make phone calls or recruit volunteers or raise money. She doesn’t like drama, and, while she encourages her team to have fun, she is not fond of “undisciplined” behaviour.

Butts says she has been angry with him only once, when he had posted an ill-advised picture on Twitter. (He didn’t say which one.) “And she was right.”

Telford’s has moved from her Toronto home to Ottawa for the duration of the election, leaving her husband — a consultant with a public affairs agency —and her parents to keep an eye on young George. When she manages to slip out of headquarters for a break, she often keeps one eye on the TV, to see her husband doing his commenting stints on CBC, while simultaneously texting Butts or Trudeau or any of the others in the vast network she’s built for this campaign.

All the while, Telford is casting a wider eye on developments. “Katie plays the long game,” says Butts.

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