Chiefs of staff for Trudeau, Harper lift veil on behind-the-scenes roles
Panel offers rare personal insights into job of helping to guide Canada’s leader
Katie Telford had committed to being in Regina on Thursday to talk about her job as chief of staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The same morning, the American government announced tariffs on Canadian steel.
The news wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it did throw a wrench into Telford’s already busy schedule.
“Our lives are predictable in their unpredictability,” Telford said Thursday, during a Congress 2018 panel discussion at the University of Regina.
“In terms of the literal day-today, you have to wake up every morning prepared … to deal with anything,” she added.
“I was able to get off a phone call before this panel after having been on them since very early this morning, knowing that that is heading in a certain direction and all the products are ready to go.”
Telford shared a stage with two former chiefs of staff.
Ian Brodie worked for former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2006-08. Judy Samuelson was chief of staff for former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow in the 1990s, then was cabinet secretary under Lorne Calvert until 2007.
Chiefs of staff are an “understudied feature of executive government,” said Anna Esselment, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Waterloo, who MCed the discussion.
That’s one reason Telford agrees to events like these: “I think people do need to know more about what it is we do ... because there is so little literature, there are not that many TV shows. And the ones that there are, like Veep and House of Cards … don’t necessarily give (people) the lessons that I would like them to (learn about us).”
The chief of staff co-ordinates the prime minister or premier’s schedule and oversees their office, which for Brodie included 85 staff members.
Telford agreed the scheduling team is “critical,” because the prime minister’s time is “the most precious resource.”
There are constant engagements — among them cabinet committee and caucus meetings, time in the House of Commons and touring Canada and the world. The chief of staff is usually along for the ride, overseeing the leader’s agenda and business for the days and weeks ahead.
The chief of staff signs off on public statements and information, oversees media releases and social media posts, and decides what medium is most appropriate — and determines what information should get out at all.
Brodie joked about a lunch he had with Globe and Mail columnist Jeffery Simpson, after Brodie had left the Prime Minister’s Office.
“He said, ‘Why did you guys run such a control-freak tight ship?’ And I said, ‘Well, because we’d all read this book Discipline of Power about what a catastrophe the last Conservative minority government was, and we all took a blood oath we will not allow Jeffrey Simpson to write a book about (the Harper government),” Brodie said, to raucous laughter from the audience of political scientists.
“That wasn’t the answer that Jeffrey wanted to hear.”
Telford said a key piece of her job is keeping the prime minister and cabinet ministers on task related to their election mandate.
The chief of staff does not make political announcements or policy decisions, but serves as a support and a sounding board for the prime minister.
Samuelson experienced this role on a “much smaller scale,” being chief of staff for a premier and coming into the job before social media. Cellphones were rare at the time.
“In one election campaign, the cellphone I had was the size of my purse and I think it weighed about 10 pounds,” she said.
A chief of staff requires flexibility, Samuelson said: “I could pretend to set my day, but my day was generally a crap shoot,” as the boss would call and her schedule would shift.
It’s a busy job — “24-hour-a-day on-call work,” said Brodie.
So when it comes to work-life balance, Telford prefers to call it a “work-life mix,” one that leans more to work at this point.
When Trudeau asked Telford to be his chief of staff, she was on maternity leave. “So bring George,” he told her.
Her six-year-old comes to work with her on days off from school.
She can tuck him in and read him Harry Potter, a smartphone allowing her to work late at home rather than physically staying late at the office.
For Samuelson, “work-life balance was mostly work.”
She recalls 18-hour workdays and doesn’t know how she would have done it having small children.
That’s one reason Brodie said he left his job in 2008: He and his wife wanted to have a second child and the job demanded too much.
Like, one Christmas, when he received a call from Harper, who reported a snafu with a scheduled phone call to Canadian troops in Kandahar.
“I spent the first hour of Christmas Day 2006 debugging why this call hadn’t gone through. It’s a great story. At the time, I’m not sure that I thought I’d live to laugh about it,” said Brodie.
The Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences is a national academic gathering that drew 5,300 people to the University of Regina this week. It wraps up Friday.