Katie Telford

Senior Consultant, Toronto

ktelford@strategycorp.com

Katie brings to StrategyCorp extensive experience from various senior roles in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park in the areas of communications, public policy, platform development and political strategy.

Described in the media as a “powerful” and “strong” woman in Federal Liberal politics, and a “brilliant” player in provincial public policy, Katie has provided senior counsel on a full range of federal and provincial issues for the Liberal Party of Canada and the McGuinty government.

Katie has served as the Chief of Staff to the Ontario Minister of Education. In that role, she was a member of Premier McGuinty’s Education Results Team and a member of the Ministry’s senior management group fulfilling a core electoral mandate in one of the government’s largest areas of responsibility.

Katie knows the mechanics of government intimately. While working at Education, she was the government lead, facilitating talks between management and labour leading to the first successful province wide labour agreement in Ontario’s education sector. The Deputy Minister of Education described the negotiations in his recent book by writing: “It was an amazing feat of political effort and strategy, which a few months earlier virtually nobody in the province would have thought possible.”

Katie also has direct experience at the federal level, where she served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition handling numerous complex federal policy and political files.

Katie served as the National Campaign Director for Gerard Kennedy’s 2006 Federal Liberal leadership campaign which, as the Toronto Star reported, would "change the dynamic of the race" right from early on.

Katie has worked on numerous election campaigns including traveling the country during a federal election campaign as a senior political advisor on the Leader’s plane and working in the war room during the successful 2003 Ontario provincial election campaign.

Katie received her Honours degree in Political Science with a minor in History from the University of Ottawa where she studied in both French and English.