Functions and authorities
The chief of staff is the executive leader of the approximately 100 partisan appointees, known as exempt staff in federal government terminology, employed by the PMO to support the Prime Minister in carrying out the functions demanded of a head of a democratic national government, a political party leader, and a Member of Parliament, with focus on supporting the prime minister in performing duties where public administration objectives overlap, intersect or compete with the prime minister's political interests by nature or by circumstances, or duties which successful execution the governing party's electoral fortune is highly sensitive to. PMO staff performs functions mainly of the following nature:
- substantive (such as policy development, legislative strategy, cabinet agenda coordination)
- marketing and communication (speechwriting, press relations)
- intelligence (public opinion research, public appointment vetting)
- relationship (stakeholder engagement, community outreach, caucus management)
- clerical (scheduling, correspondence)
- operational (tour logistics, security coordination, protocol)
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. [1] PMO's renumeration and operational costs are incurred as part of the estimates of the Privy Council Office (PCO), the federal department made up of career civil servants responsible for cross-government coordination and providing support and non-partisan advice to the federal cabinet [2] , and the two offices are co-located in the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council building, formerly known as the Langevin Block, directly facing Parliament Hill. While PMO staff collaborates extensively with PCO officials and the two offices are functionally interdependent of each other, PMO is an autonomous unit distinct from the PCO 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 following 1971 quote by Gordon Robertson, then Clerk of the Privy Council has been often cited by academic discourse to highlight the distinction of the two offices, and the importance of the proper maintenance of their relationship.
"The Prime Minister's Office is partisan, politically oriented, yet operationally sensitive. The Privy Council Office is non-partisan, operationally oriented yet politically sensitive.... What is known in each office is provided freely and openly to the other if it is relevant or needed for its work, but each acts from a perspective and in a role quite different from the other." [3]
The chief of staff exercises authority over not only PMO staff, but over all ministerial staff across the federal government. These officials are not considered a part of the civil services, and are collectively referred to as exempt staff for the fact that they are exempt from the recruitment process, professional development, activities restrictions, and employment protections of the Public Service Employment Act applicable to civil servants. Their continual employment is subject to their political masters 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.
History of the role of the Prime Minister's top aide
Prior to the creation of the chief of staff position, the office was headed by the prime minister's principal secretary, a position that is now secondary to the chief of staff. [4]
The title of Chief of Staff was formally instituted by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney March 1987. It was formally announced 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), has been seconded to PMO to be the Prime Minister's chief of staff, and that the incumbent PMO top aide Bernard Roy, a personal confidant of Mulroney who had held the title of principal secretary since Mulroney's election in 1984, would retain the title and would relinquish administrative leadership of PMO to focus on or more political matters. [4] The move was a compromise by Mulroney, who famously extoled personal loyalty as a cherished virtue. Roy 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%), a province Roy was responsible for. [5] His background as one of Mulroney's closest friends was also hugely inconvenient fodder as the opposition focused their attack on cronyism and sleaze. 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 parallel 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.
Since 1987, the principal secretary title remained in use but not consistently, reserved for the most part for a trusted personal confidents of the sitting Prime Minister with seniority equal to or immediately follow the chief of staff. Prime Minister Jean Chretien did not name a principal secretary during his decade-long premiership. Prime Ministers Stephan Harper and Justin Trudeau appointed respectively Ray Novak and Gerald Butts as principal secretaries, both long-time associate to them decades before their premiership with no replacements named after they relinquished the role (respectively for promotion and for departure).
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