Carolyn Stewart-Olsen  Carolyn Stewart-Olsen (born July 27, 1946) is a Conservative senator from New Brunswick. She was formerly Senior Advisor and Director of Strategic Communication in the Prime Minister's Office of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. Stewart-Olsen was born and raised in Sackville, New Brunswick, and worked as a nurse for 20 years before becoming a political staffer. Stewart-Olsen, a registered nurse by profession, had a twenty-year nursing career including ten years as an emergency room nurse New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec before being appointed Head Nurse for the Ambulatory Care Department at Ottawa's Grace Hospital in 1986. She later became Nursing Manager for the Emergency, Recovery Room, Ambulatory Care, and CSR departments at Carleton Place Hospital. In 1993, Stewart-Olsen became a volunteer in the communications office of the Reform Party of Canada under Preston Manning, newly settling in as a major party in the House of Commons. She later came on staff as a media officer or press aide until 2000, serving through the creation of its first successor party, the Canadian Alliance and the leadership of Stockwell Day, who defeated Manning for the Alliance leadership. In January 2000 she was fired, reportedly by Phil von Finckenstein, who had been brought on by Manning, "but blamed Stockwell Day for her misfortune," according to LifeSite, a socially conservative online news service which favoured Day over Manning. Stewart-Olsen then went to work for Deborah Grey, the first Reform MP and a Manning loyalist, and in 2001, she was identified as a press aide to the Democratic Representative Caucus, a group of dissidents including Grey who broke with the party under Day's leadership. In the 2002 Canadian Alliance leadership election, she became press secretary to Harper in his successful challenge to Day, planting a strong reciprocal loyalty between the two that would strengthen through the 2004 leadership race of its successor the Conservative Party of Canada, and Stewart-Olsen's frequent contact with Harper in their work; a 2005 "Globe and Mail" report said that Stewart-Olsen and executive assistant Ray Novak, "mid-level staffers," were "seen as having his ear, much more so than many higher-ranking staff in the [Opposition leader's] office of about 100." As Harper's press secretary, Stewart-Olsen survived several periods of significant turnover in Harper's communication staff; in opposition in 2005, amid one such transition, media reports stated that Stewart-Olsen was widely tipped to succeed Geoff Norquay as communications director, but she remained in her position as press secretary.