As is so often the case, I blame Jed Bartlet. “You got a best friend?” The West Wing‘s president asks Roger Tribbey, the secretary of agriculture, a one-off role played by Harry Groener in episode 12 of season 1, “He Shall From Time to Time.”
“Yes sir,” Roger says gamely. It’s the night of the State of the Union address, and Jed’s off to give the big speech. Roger is this year’s designated survivor, the guy who’s supposed to become president if Bartlet and the rest of the line of succession get blown up over at the House of Representatives.
“Is he smarter than you?” Bartlet asks about Roger’s friend. “Yes, sir,” is the answer.
“Would you trust him with your life?” “Yes, sir.”
“That’s your chief of staff.” Of course by this point Leo McGarry is in his office next door, and he’s Bartlet’s chief of staff, and we are reminded that this is how Leo got the big job, and everyone starts to get a little misty.
Now, sometimes it works out. Jean Chrétien met Jean Pelletier at the Séminaire St.-Joseph in Trois Rivières and 40 years later Pelletier was Chrétien’s chief of staff in Ottawa. Pelletier was exactly the sort of person Jed Bartlet would have recommended. But even some happy veterans of those days suspect that more distance between the two men would have helped both avoid administrative blind spots, like the sponsorship scandal.
Then there are the cases, otherwise not similar, of Dean French, who quit on Friday as Ontario premier Doug Ford’s chief of staff, and Gerald Butts, who resigned in February as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary. What do these two departures have to tell us about the governing styles of two very different leaders, and, if anything, about what ails us today as a society?
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See Also:
(1) Ottawa unveils anti-racism strategy, which includes definition of Islamophobia
(3) Dividing Canada into vote banks, one tribe at a time
(4) Trudeau’s feminist government fails again
(5) Report: China bans all Canadian meat before G20 as Trudeau turns to Trump on detainees
