Next to last man standing

Jeremy Broadhurst is a Liberal lifer tasked with getting Trudeau re-elected (with some help from Gerry Butts)

My assignment was to write about the Liberal campaign director. So I looked at the internet and there was a release from the Liberal Party of Canada from May 1: “Liberals Announce 2019 Campaign Director.” The photo at the top of the release was Jeremy Broadhurst’s. The release featured glowing praise from Justin Trudeau. “Jeremy Broadhurst’s leadership . . . will help us continue to build a 2019 campaign that is innovative, empowering, and competitive in every part of Canada,” the Prime Minister says in the release.

So I emailed the Liberal party office, and soon I was having coffee with Jeremy Broadhurst near Parliament Hill. We talked about his background in Liberal politics (long) and his plans for the fall election campaign.

And then a few days later the CBC’s Aaron Wherry reported that Gerald Butts was returning to the Liberal campaign.

So I’m not really sure what you should make of the rest of this profile. It’s definitely a profile of Jeremy Broadhurst, and it says on the label that he is definitely the Liberal campaign director. But whether Broadhurst can be said to be running the Liberal campaign—well, Butts’s return makes that very much a theological question.

Butts, of course, held none of the fanciest titles in the Liberals’ 2015 campaign. Cyrus Reporter, a lawyer and former chief of staff to Allan Rock, was Trudeau’s chief of staff; Katie Telford, who would have a long future in the Trudeau camp, and Dan Gagnier, who wouldn’t, were its campaign co-chairs. Butts was usually styled a senior adviser or, more accurately and all-encompassingly, as Gerry. But his advice, and the weight Trudeau gave it, made him more senior than just about all the people who did have titles.

Butts’s resignation as Trudeau’s principal secretary in February of this year, in the early days of the SNC-Lavalin controversy, promptly elevated the whole affair to the level of a political earthquake. His return is a large event whose meaning is uncertain.

Once again, at least for the moment, he has no title, though one senior Liberal said