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Many Conservatives may be less than grateful that Jenni Byrne, the party’s former campaign director, has aired her views on what went wrong for the party in the 2015 election.

But Canadian political historians ought to thank Byrne for her unexpected columnist’s turn in The Globe and Mail this week, which clears up a couple of long-running mysteries — and deepens the intrigue around another lingering question from the 2015 campaign.

First, it’s handy to know that within the Conservative party — at least as it was organized in 2015 — campaign directors don’t actually direct the campaigns. According to Byrne’s own account, she had limited say on important decisions about strategy and message — and, in fact, some of the decisions she did make were overruled.

Much had been made of the fact that in 2015, for the first time in Canadian history, the three main federal parties had women in charge of the campaign organizations. The Liberals had Katie Telford, the New Democrats had Anne McGrath; Byrne was supposed to be the third member of that glass-ceiling-busting triumvirate.

We may need to correct the record. If Byrne’s Globe column is accurate, she didn’t wield the same authority enjoyed by her counterparts in rival parties. (We can re-correct the record, I guess, if McGrath or Telford write similar columns in future about how their views were ignored too.)

Byrne says, for instance, that she didn’t want the Conservative party to attack New Democrats — which they did. “Having argued since 2011,” she writes, “that the NDP were never our main opponent, including making the internally unpopular decision of dismantling our NDP unit that was tasked with tracking and attacking that party, I lost the argument to others who felt they were the more serious threat.”

This is fascinating. Even more interesting, though, is how Byrne argues that for the Conservatives, the NDP wasn’t simply the lesser of the two threats — it was a strategic ally. “The party needed the NDP to do well,” she writes. “The decision during the campaign to turn our guns on the NDP was a mistake. They were never the party’s enemy.”

So if the campaign director, rank-and-file Conservatives, the party leader and even international political gurus were all not responsible for the descent of the 2015 campaign into dog-whistle politics, who was? So if the campaign director, rank-and-file Conservatives, the party leader and even international political gurus were allresponsible for the descent of the 2015 campaign into dog-whistle politics, who was?

Years ago, when I was writing the first edition of my book Shopping For Votes, I included a story about how a top strategist for Harper, Patrick Muttart, had given the NDP a heads-up about the first wave of attack ads against former Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion. My book editor, a non-political sort, asked a useful question: “Why would he do that?”

Now we know.

This also explains why the Conservatives continued to devote huge ad resources to attacking Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau when he was running third in the polls in the spring and summer of 2015 — well behind the NDP and Tom Mulcair.

We can assume, judging by Byrne’s column, that this was part of the master plan. Until it wasn’t.

Here’s a thought, though: It’s very possible that this master plan played right into the Liberals’ hands. If a lot of Canadians were looking for a replacement for Harper, the Conservative ads fairly shouted at them that Harper saw Trudeau as the greater threat. That’s the thing about strategy: It works best when it’s secret.

On that measure, the whole, sorry tale of the niqab controversy in Election 2015 remains the biggest, most secret strategy of all — even after Byrne’s column, or maybe because of it.

Apparently Byrne wasn’t a fan of the idea of whipping up a big debate over Muslim face coverings during the campaign — not because she had moral or ideological objections, mind you, but because it hurt the NDP.

Many Conservatives I talked to after the election weren’t crazy about this turn in the campaign, either; they said it hurt them at the doorsteps and in many of the cultural communities they had spent a decade courting.

For a while last fall, the guy getting most of the blame for the niqab debate was Australian campaign guru Lynton Crosby, who was reportedly consulted to help pull the Conservative campaign back on track. That speculation eventually collided with the fact that Crosby was nowhere to be seen around the Conservative campaign, while his business partner was issuing ever-more-forceful declarations of distance from the Canadian election.

“It’s pretty simple. Neither Crosby nor Textor are there. Nor staff. We don’t do bit-part politics,” Mark Textor said on Twitter in reply to an iPolitics story.

What’s more, Conservative party sources told me around the same time that, if Crosby had been giving advice, he probably would have told Harper to stick with the economy as an issue.

Even Harper himself, we recall, was displaying some ambivalence about wading into the niqab controversy. Though he did muse aloud on a couple of occasions about banning public servants from wearing the niqab, Harper then seemed to back off, to try to turn the campaign back to economic matters in the final days of the election.

So if the campaign director, rank-and-file Conservatives, the party leader and even international political gurus were all not responsible for the descent of the 2015 campaign into dog-whistle politics, who was?

Now that former Conservative campaign officials have started talking, that’s the next column I’d like to read.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

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