Illustration by Matthew Billington
A prime minister only has so many hours in a day. For Mark Carney, whose attention has been divided between a trade war with the U.S., a flashy investment summit, and deepening European ties, that might be truer than ever. Enter: the Prime Minister’s Office, Carney’s inner circle. “In every government that I have known, that top echelon of a prime minister's staff almost always has more influence and more impact on what the government does than most of the ministers in his cabinet," says an Ottawa insider close to the prime minister.
Carney is in the limelight: we know who he is and what he’s up to. His elected position holds him accountable. That’s not true of the PMO. “It’s not public service,” says Lori Turnbull, political scientist and director of the School of Public Administration and associate prof. at Dalhousie University. The Ottawa insider makes a similar point about visibility: "They are the people making key decisions every day that affect our lives, and we just don't know who they are, because they are staff appointments."
While we may not have as much insight into the key members of Carney’s PMO, we do know their appointments mark a sharp turn away from Trudeau’s staffing style. “Trudeau’s PMO were his friends. They were people who he was in the debating club with; they were in his wedding party,” notes Turnbull, adding that principal secretary Gerald Butts was his best friend since childhood. For Carney, “This is his place to be corporate,” she says.
Carney is described as “a bit of a unicorn” — he didn’t rise in the traditional political ranks, which means he doesn’t come with the usual political coterie that would have helped him ascend to power. When he became PM, he inherited the infrastructure of his predecessor, and has been slowly rebuilding his team piece by piece to suit his goals. “He needs people who are responsive to him and who he can fire tomorrow if he's not happy with them,” says Turnbull.
His leadership style is also distinct, informed by his résumé in banking. “He’s very ‘key-performance-indicator,’” says the Ottawa insider, noting that Carney would walk into meetings knowing what every person in every department was up to. “And if he thought you were not on top of it, he would question you in front of your colleagues.” It’s a departure from Trudeau’s leadership style, which was more consultative and relaxed. “They probably got a lot less done,” muses the insider.
Carney didn't come to Ottawa with a ready-made team, but he's since assembled one in his own image. “Carney is certainly bringing people with more business acumen and savvy that come from his links within the financial world,” says Chris George, a government relations advisor who also has a column in The Niagara Independent. This is a core group of advisors he trusts enough to hand off the parts of the job he can't get to. Three names sit at the top of that list: Michael Sabia, Marc-André Blanchard, and Scott Gilmore.
The Top Tier
The Ottawa insider opines that Carney thinks the most highly of Michael Sabia. While not technically part of the PMO, Sabia is Clerk of the Privy Council — the person running the machinery of government. The former president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, who also served as deputy minister of finance under Trudeau from 2020 to 2023, brings a private-sector fixer's instincts and a creative policy mind to the top of the public service. Sabia was key to finishing the agreements for the Alberta pipeline and BC infrastructure deals, dispatched as Carney’s personal emissary. “I think he’s a very good lieutenant,” says George, who paints him in a similar light as Carney. Like the PM, he has a rigorous work ethic — in the private sector, he was known for calling people on a Sunday morning and asking them about their work.
If Sabia is the one Carney sends to get a deal over the line, Chief of Staff Marc-André Blanchard is the one he turns to when something threatens to fall apart. When trade talks with the U.S. came undone in August, Blanchard was called in to go to Washington to see if there was anything left to salvage. He's also the one who steps in when the PMO and Finance disagree on what belongs in a policy package — negotiating directly with Minister François-Philippe Champagne over which priorities make the cut.
Then there's Scott Gilmore. Catherine McKenna, formerly the environment minister under Trudeau and Gilmore's ex-wife, calls the known member of the Conservative Party a "Carney Liberal." On the press tour for her book, McKenna said, "He was a Progressive Conservative and felt we needed progressive policy. He was never a card-carrying Liberal when I was in politics." In July, Gilmore was promoted from Carney's foreign policy, national security, and defence advisor to principal secretary — a shift, according to the Ottawa insider, from troubleshooter to long-range strategist.
On paper, Gilmore — who, like Sabia, has an inventive policy mind — is tasked with mapping out the government's political calendar: which trade deals get pursued when, which federal-provincial fights get picked, and when to escalate on something like the Alberta referendum. But even the inside source who provided that job description isn't sure Gilmore has fully grown into it yet. It's a role, the Ottawa insider suggests, that's still being defined in real time.
The Next Wave
Just below Sabia, Blanchard, and Gilmore sits a second layer that’s as consequential to the day-to-day — despite some of these names rarely surfacing in the press.
Case in point? Tim Krupa. The former Goldman Sachs banker ran as the Liberal candidate in Kelowna–Lake Country in 2021 before joining Carney's team as director of policy. He's since been promoted to deputy chief of staff and chief economist. He's less focused on ensuring “the trains run on time” than on big-picture policy matters, as one of the sources puts it. Plus, his Wall Street credentials “help him understand what the fuck Carney is talking about,” says the insider of Krupa’s economic chops.
And yet, for someone who ranks at the top of the PMO in terms of influence and importance — and further speaks to the corporatization of the PMO, per Turnbull — Krupa draws surprisingly little attention. It’s a blind spot shared by Turnbull, George, and the Ottawa insider alike.
The next person on the list is trusted enough that she called for a brand-new title. Maia Johnson took on a new post as chief operating officer, on top of her existing role as senior US-Canada relations advisor. Her American ties run deep: connections to Hillary Clinton, JD Vance, Michael Bloomberg, and the Soros family. She's also tied to John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign manager, who later ran Joe Biden's green programs. "She's a seasoned campaigner, she's furiously partisan, and she's loyal to that group," says George.
With Sabia, Blanchard, and Gilmore all generating "policy inventions," as the Ottawa source puts it, someone has to make sure they get signed off and executed. That someone is Johnson. What's less clear, George notes, is where her mandate as COO actually ends — and where Blanchard's begins.
Rounding out this tier are two names built for continuity. Andrée Lynn-Halle has served in both the Trudeau and Carney PMOs since 2015, rising from press secretary to deputy chief of staff — currently handling, as the insider puts it, "all things Quebec," from political sign-offs to appointments. Her communications instincts matter for a PM who, in Turnbull's words, "sometimes really sounds like he's still a CEO." Lynn-Halle understands the unique political communications issues that come up, Turnbull notes — proof, she adds, that Carney hasn't entirely lost the political thread even as he stacks the rest of his office with finance hires.
Mary Rose Brown is a name that rarely makes headlines but, per the Ottawa insider, is "emerging almost at Lynn-Halle and Johnson’s level." Before Gilmore's promotion to principal secretary, Brown played the same troubleshooter role for Carney that Gilmore now holds; today, as senior advisor, she plays it for Blanchard, executing whatever he needs handled. Over the past six months, she's reportedly been central to a run of defence-related announcements.
Who Will Last?
For all the talk of corporatization, the PMO is, at the end of the day, an office — and no office is immune to ordinary workplace foibles like burnout. "These guys start at six a.m. and go until midnight," the Ottawa insider says, recalling his own time working alongside a PMO. "It's hard — the chasing, the running around, being there all the time to support whatever the prime minister needs. Turnover is high, because no one wants to be there for a long time. You just burn out,” adds Turnbull.
Carney’s decisive, get-things-done style also comes at the cost of consultation. When trade talks with Washington collapsed, industry and labour groups on Carney's own advisory committees were left far less in the loop than they'd been during Trudeau's more consultative approach to renegotiating NAFTA. "It won't always be okay to be less consultative," the insider says. "It won't always be okay to be less external in your outlook." While that approach might be working for now, “that book is still being written,” says the Ottawa insider.
It's a fitting metaphor. Pierre Trudeau's own Chief of Staff, Jim Coutts, kept a diary that sat unpublished for decades before finally revealing just how much of that government was actually run from inside the PMO when it was released as a book in 2025.
Right now, somewhere inside Carney’s Ottawa, a similar record might be getting penned.
With files from Liz Guber.
