No drama in rumoured PMO departure

Enough is enough; people come and people go. There is no drama in the departure of the PM’s Chief of Staff, should it come to pass. It’s just par for the course in Ottawa.

The first few news articles and columns about the rumoured pending departure of PMO Chief of Staff Guy Giorno were to be ignored. When you leave Parliament Hill, even of your own volition, the media tends to kick you in the pants on the way out the door. Today’s DTM column on the subject continues the theme, and it seems high time to put it to rest.

Mr. Giorno has been there for the requisite two years. The PMO CoS role is as tough a staff job as they come. Two years is all anyone can/should handle, so the fact that Mr. Giorno may be returning to his law practice and young family reflects his sanity in my mind, and nothing to do with the daily ups and downs of national polls.

Former PM Brian Mulroney had five Chiefs during his nine years in office. In my day, we even referred to the tenures by numbers: CoS Hugh Segal led “PMO 5”, that odd choice of Norman Spector was “PMO 4”, and so on. I’ll make the math easy: 5 Chiefs in less than 10 years is an average tenure of just under two years. Did Derek Burney or Stanley Hartt leave Mr. Mulroney’s direct employ due to weak or strong polls? Not a chance; they had other things to do. Their two years were up.

When I joined Mr. Mulroney’s staff in 1991, two of the four prior Mulroney-era CoS EAs had died of tragic heart attacks either in the PMO job, or a short time thereafter. These were people in their prime. That should give you some idea of the stress of the place, and that was 20 years ago, before the BlackBerry and Justice Gomery added even more stress to the place.

In Mr. Giorno’s case, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t laying the groundwork for his departure six or twelve months ago; he is, after all, an excellent tactician according to the media. When Minister Flaherty’s Chief, Derek Vanstone, joined a few months ago as Deputy Chief of Staff to the PM, many took it as another signal that Mr. Giorno was building the team for a near term transition away from the job.

It is true, however, that these media reports may serve the PM well. Any mistakes are the fault of bad staffing, that’s just part of the job. No elected official writes a bad speech or dreams up a kooky policy. That’s what staff do. When things go well, all credit flows to the boss; that goes with the territory. In the Secret Service parlance: staff must take the bullet. And the inverse is also true.

Does it help Michael Ignatieff if the media report at length that his change in momentum all started with the arrival of his new Chief of Staff, Peter Donolo? That the 50 year tradition of a stumping bus tour was Mr. Donolo’s idea? Mr. Donolo isn’t on the ballot, of course, which is why his boss must get all the credit for being the new person that he is coming across lately in the media — even though it near impossible for middle-aged men to be anything other than who they are, deep down.

Which brings us back to Mr. Giorno. Whether or not any of us, or his ultimate successor, would have given the same advice or made the same decisions over the past two years isn’t the point. If you’re not there, in the foxhole, you have no idea what you’d have done differently, or if you’d have served Prime Minister Harper any better than the incumbent. Or if the Boss would have taken your advice to do something different, or the same. What you can be sure of is it would have taxed you like few other white-collar jobs in the world.

If you want any more proof about the specific shelf life of the CoS role, just look to Washington.

I see that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel may also be taking his leave after two “short” years. His boss couldn’t be in more political hotwater (save the intern), and yet Mr. Emanuel appears to be floating a trial baloon about running for Mayor of Chicago: “something I’ve always wanted to do if the job became available”. Some might say he’s putting himself ahead of the President, being disloyal even, and hurting Mr. Obama at the very moment he needs to break-out of the challenges of the past year.

Whatever the coming months will bring, whether he stays or goes, no one can say that about Guy.

MRM
(this blog, like all posts, is a personal view and in no way represents the views of the TPA, its Board/Staff, or the Federal Government)