The chief of staff to the prime minister, sometimes referred to as the PMO Chief of Staff, is the most senior political advisor to the prime minister of Canada, the formal executive head of the political appointees employed in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), and the leader of the broader group of politically appointed ministerial aide across the ministry in power (the exempted staff in federal government jargon). Marc-André Blanchard has been the Chief of Staff since July 2025.
The current title was formally instituted and conferred to the inaugural holder Derek Burney in March 1987, and has been in continual use since. In the two decades preceding 1987, the ranking political aide to the prime minister held the title principal secretary to the prime minister. The title remained in use as has been conferred from time to time to the second ranking advisor.
Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of Canada
The chief of staff is the executive head of the approximately 100 partisan appointees, or exempt staff employed by the PMO to support the Prime Minister in discharging their many overlapping roles and functions.
The chief of staff position is classified for salary and benefit purposes at the most senior executive level, with rate of pay comparable to deputy ministers.[2] While PMO's renumeration and operational costs are incurred as part of the estimates of the Privy Council Office (PCO) and the two offices are functionally interdependent of each other, PMO is an autonomous unit distinct from the PCO. The chief of staff is accountable to the prime minister and is not subject to the management authority of PCO's departmental executive leader, the Clerk of the Privy Council, who is also the head of the entire federal civil service workforce.
The chief of staff exercises authority over not only PMO staff, but over all politically appointed ministerial staff across the federal government. These exempt staff, similar to SpAds in the United Kingdom, are not considered civil services. Their continual employment is subject to their political principals remaining office and having confidence in them. PMO staff members and the ministerial chiefs of staff are accountable to the PMO chief of staff, who in turn is accountable directly to the prime minister.
As a trusted advisor with regular access to the prime minister, the informal authority and influence wielded by the chief of staff is exponentially larger than authority the formal function leading the few hundreds aides would confer. In recent decades with both Liberal and Conservative ministries, it is generally accepted (and a grievance by many parliamentarians) that the chief of staff's and their senior deputies' influence over public policy are comparable to those of the most senior members of cabinet.
Broader use of the titles
The ranking political advisors who head the office of the Leader of the Official Opposition (OLO) and of most provincial premiers are also known as chief of staff. Some of those offices also confer their second ranking advisor the title of principal secretary. The specific roles of the chief of staff and the principal secretary, and their division of responsibilities and authorities vary from office to office depending on how the preference of specific political principal. This has sometimes led to ambiguity in defining the distinction between the roles of principal secretary and chief of staff to the general public.[3]
History of role
The development of the role of PMO chief of staff, and more generally of political staff in Canada, draw a mix of influences and inspiration from the two countries we it shared the most political heritage, the United Kingdom and the United State. Political leaders have placed loyal supporters and partisans allies on public payroll to serve to serve crucial gatekeeping functions probably for as long as there were government. Identifying the cadre of partisan appointees as a special category and formally distinguishing them from career civil servants however are more recent phenomenon. The growing size of the political staff in Canada reflects a gradual shift from Whitehall political practice in the United Kingdom (where political leaders are served by in large seconded civil servants in roles of private secretary, with a small number of partisan advisor hired into the rank; partisan temporary appointees serving as aides to cabinet members, titled "special advisors", was not formally instituted until 1997, and remain fewer than 150 as of 2025) toward the political practice in the United States (where political appointee fill a wide range of roles at all level of seniority).
The development of the current role of PMO chief of staff can be broken into three eras.
As private secretaries, before 1960s
From confederation to the 1950s, there were no formal, fixed position for or title conferred to the most senior political aide to the prime minister. There were also little formal separation of partisan loyalist hired by a prime minister from career civil servants once they were employed inside the government, and many individuals traversed the two spheres, remained employed even after their principals were ousted. The lack of formal structure however did not prevent certain aide from being identified or broadly recognized as the primary partisan political aides or most trusted staff advisors to the prime minister.
Following British practices, such aides were usually titled private secretary, principle private secretary, or simply secretary to the prime minister, and were part of the civil service at a middle management rank. Their authority was relatively limited. Private secretaries' key functions in those days were around handling correspondence for their principal, maintaining the principal's diary, gatekeeping, to being the personal aide/body man. The role as political and strategic advisor were more incidental.
In both the UK and in Canada, as the civil service became more professionalized, a greater emphasis is placed on its member to be non-partisan. This naturally creates tension for private secretaries serving senior political leaders. The degree of "politicalness" of the senior private secretaries vacillated fairly widely for much of the first half of the 20th century. From the late 1910s to the 1930s, Arthur Merriam was a constant presence as a private secretary whenever the Conservatives were in power, serving three prime ministers in four different ministries over two decades. However, their rival Liberal Mackenzie King, a civil servant who reached senior ranks at a young page before entering politics, much preferred to be serviced by those with his background, top performing younger civil servants, with storied public servants like Arnold Heeney and Walter Turnbull having served as his principal private secretary before taking top rank civil service roles. Tension exists even within the same office. Jack Pickersgill, who started his career as an external affairs civil servant and went on to become Clerk of the Privy Council and then cabinet minister, grumbled about feeling constricted by the non-partisan emphasis when he was a junior private secretary under Heeney and Turnbull, and asked PM King to steer all matters deemed too partisan by other private secretaries to his direction.[4]
Principal Secretaries, 1968-1987
From 1968 to 1987, the title principal secretary was formally and consistently used to denote an individual who was the prime minister's principal political advisor and formal head of the PMO staff.
Marc Lalonde, an associate of Pierre Trudeau in the early 1950s, was recruited to be Lester Pearson's policy advisor in 1967. He was credited for a significant roles in orchestrating Trudeau's bid for leadership,[5][6] and was formally conferred the title Principal Secretary following Trudeau's victory at the 1968 leadership convention. A distinct staff of partisan aides was formalized during the early years of Trudeau's premiership, and PMO staff grew from a handful of aides to dozens of political operatives.
The rapid development of this staff was partially due to the unique circumstances brought by October Crisis, requiring Lalonde to build a larger team within PMO to handle operations that may not be tenable to have assigned to civil servants.[7] Lalonde's role representing the prime minister to Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau during the crisis also significantly solidified the chief aide's formal authority in speaking on behalf of the prime minister. At Trudeau's urging, Lalonde ran for and won a seat in the election following the crisis and immediately entered cabinet. The succession by Martin O'Connell, a cabinet minister defeated at the same election (who went on to regain his seat in parliament in 1974 and in cabinet 1978), as principal secretary further solidified the role's formal authority.
The title Chief of Staff emerged as the title of the prime minister's top aide when Joe Clark's top advisor Bill Neville, who had been using the title in the opposition leader's office, carried it over to PMO. The appearance was cut short due to the brief tenure of the Clark ministry.
Chiefs of Staff, since 1987
The title chief of staff was formally instituted and supplanted principal secretary as the top ranking post in PMO in 1987 during Bernard Roy's tenure as Brian Mulroney's principal secretary.[8] Roy, a personal confidant of Mulroney who had held the title since Mulroney's election in 1984, was seen as an ineffective administrator lacking strong political instinct, and was blamed for the precipitous drops of progressive conservative's Quebec polling numbers (from 50% in the 1984 election to 17% in 1987), a province Roy was responsible for. His background as one of Mulroney's closest friends was also inconvenient fodder when the opposition focused their attack on cronyism and sleaze. Mulroney, who famously extoled personal loyalty as a cherished virtue announced in March 1987 that Derek Burney, a career diplomat who was at the time an assistant under-secretary of state at the Department of External Affairs (comparable to a modern-day assistant deputy minister in Global Affairs Canada), would be seconded to PMO to be the Prime Minister's chief of staff, and Roy would retain his title but would relinquish administrative leadership of PMO to focus on or more political matters.
The appointment of a career civil servant with no personal ties to the prime minister also served to signal a renewed focus on professionalism. It drew parallels to US president Ronald Reagan's appointment of former senator Howard Baker as his chief of staff just a few weeks prior with the explicate mandate to address chaos that took hold of the White House during the Iran-Contra scandal.
as Principal Private Secretary Later: Clerk of the Privy Council 1940-49; Under Secretary for External Affairs 1949-52; Ambassador to NATO 1952-53, United States 1953-57, 59-62; CC 1968
Walter J. Turnbull
1940
1945
as Principal Private Secretary Later: Deputy Postmaster General 1945-57
as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister[g] Promoted from: assistant private secretary Later: Clerk of the Privy Council 1952-53; MP for Bonavista—Twillingate 1953-67; cabinet minister (Sec of State for Canada 1953-54, 63-64; immigration 1954-57; gov't house leader 1963; transport 1964-67); CC 1970
as Chief of Staff Previous & later: Chief of staff to Clark as opposition leader (1976-79, 80-81) both in government and in opposition; E.A.[i] to Liberal Ministers Judy LaMarsh and Edgar Benson (1965-69)[19]
↑Attended the Charlottetown Conference as private secretary to the Attorney General of Canada West, the role held by Macdonald at the time. [9]
↑Some sources suggested Hewitt Bernard, Macdonald's brother-in-law, was his private secretary during the first Macdonald minister (1867-73). That is likely a conflation of Bernard's earlier service as his private secretary (1858-64) while he was Premier of the Province of Canada and his role at this time as deputy minister to Macdonald in his role as justice minister (1867-76).
↑Gideon Matte, campaign manager for King's Prince Albert constituency, was delegated the clerical duties and held the title private secretary.[17]
12From 1957 to late 1959, top official in Diefenbaker's PMO was the private secretary. In October 1959, incumbent P.S. Guest initiated an reorganization of the PMO, during which he delegated secretarial functions to Michael J. Deacey, who assumed the title private secretary. Guest remained the senior aide and assumed the title executive assistant.[18]
12Chiefs of staff to ministers were titled Executive Assistants until 1990s.
Principal secretaries as senior counsellor, deputy chiefs
Since 1987, the principal secretary title remained in use intermittently, and usually by a trusted personal confidant of the sitting prime minister with seniority comparable to or just below the chief of staff's. Prime Minister Jean Chretien did not name a principal secretary during his decade-long premiership. Prime ministers Stephen Harper appointed close associate Ray Novak (who famously lived rent-free above the garage at Stornoway when Harper was leader of the opposition) to the role, and left the role vacant after Novak was promoted to the top job. Similarly, Justin Trudeau named no replacement in the six years following the departure of principal secretary Gerald Butts, a close confidant since their university days.
Depending on the personal approach and preferences of the prime minister, the duties of managing, administrating and co-ordinating the activities of the PMO may belong to the principal secretary, the chief of staff, or another key advisor. The Government of Canada does not maintain official public records of those who held leadership positions in the PMO. The Parliament's official website has a non-exhaustive list of "Leadership of the Prime Minister's Office", with likely no defined criteria for inclusion (as evident by the inclusion of a large numbers of "senior advisors" in Justin Trudeau's PMO while omitting the two deputy chief of staff who ranked above them).
12Right to honorific conferred after being PM's chief aide
↑Eddie Goldenberg (chief policy advisor 1993-2002, chief of staff 2003) generally viewed as most influential aide even before formally made chief of staff due to working history.
↑Initially an interim appointment, he has remained in the role during and after Lametti's tenure.[20]
↑Pickersgill, J.W.; Forster, D.F. (1970). The Mackenzie King Record Volume 3, 1945/46. University of Toronto Press. p.4. ISBN9781487580315.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
↑Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker Centre. "Finding Aid No. 1218" (1963) [Textual record]. Rt Hon John G Diefenbaker Papers, Series: Prime Minister's Office Numbered Correspondence, p.10. Saskatoon, SK: Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker Centre, University of Saskatchewan.
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