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It may be June, but it’s time for Dean French to take a walk in the snow.

The Premier’s chief of staff somehow managed to blow up all attempts to change the channel with a cabinet shuffle by making some really bad patronage appointments on the same day.

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It was just after 12:30 p.m. Thursday when Premier Doug Ford was admitting that communicating the government’s message was a problem he hoped to fix with his cabinet shuffle.

“We’re going to make sure that we’re very clear on our message,” Ford told me when I asked him about past communications problems.

Just two hours later, a news release went out that would step all over Ford’s message: four new appointments to positions in New York, Chicago, Dallas and London tasked with selling Ontario to the international business community as a place to invest and create jobs.

That should have been a good news announcement — even if the timing was bad.

It turned into a disaster, and the man at the centre of it all is French.