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There was consternation in the public service and confusion in Ottawa’s political class mid-week when Justin Trudeau ditched Janice Charette as clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet, replacing her with her deputy clerk, Michael Wernick.

The PS was shocked at the timing of the clerk shuffle — Wednesday afternoon, two days before a deputy ministers’ retreat that Charette would have chaired, with the announcement itself being made in a news release by the prime minister from the Davos conference in Switzerland.

So Trudeau was out of town and out of the country. Bad form. Mind you, it’s happened once before — in 2009, when the Prime Minister’s Office announced the departure of Kevin Lynch as clerk while Stephen Harper was visiting Canadian troops in Afghanistan. In both instances, the PMO’s approach was insensitive and inelegant.

The confusion among politicos arose from the second paragraph of Trudeau’s announcement — which said that “the prime minister has asked Mr. Wernick for advice on a process to fill the position on a permanent basis.”

That could have used an edit. It also should have been moved to the first paragraph, instead of following a sentence about Charette remaining as a senior adviser in PCO “pending a new assignment.”

Consulting and lobbying firms were immediately inundated with calls and texts from clients asking whether filling “the position on a permanent basis” referred to Charette’s new assignment, or — more likely — “a process” for filling the clerk’s role on a permanent basis. In other words, part of Wernick’s mandate is to help find his own replacement.

So (people were asking themselves) was Wernick clerk, interim clerk or a placeholder for someone else? Those questions would have been very much on the minds of his colleagues as they gathered Friday at the DMs’ retreat. The clerk is not only secretary to the cabinet, but also head of the public service.

Wernick has been in the public service since he joined Finance 35 years ago, and notably survived eight years as DM at Aboriginal Affairs from 2006-14, a tumultuous period even by the standards of a department which historically has been a graveyard for many careers. Wernick’s time covered Stephen Harper’s apology to First Nations, the appointment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Idle No More movement and the sabotaging of the First Nations Control of Education Act by dissident chiefs. As clerk, he’s uniquely qualified to lead the implementation of the TRC’s sweeping recommendations, Trudeau having accepted all 94 of them.

But as a placeholder. The question is — who’s next?

The obvious candidate is Matthew Mendelsohn.

Who? He’s an academic from McGill and Université de Montréal, a poli-sci prof at Queen’s turned public servant at Queen’s Park, founder of the Mowat Centre think-tank at University of Toronto, adviser to the Liberals in the fall election and transition.

Charette, highly popular with her staff and well regarded by the PS, has been left ‘pending’. The town has taken note. Trudeau and his entourage got this wrong. Charette, highly popular with her staff and well regarded by the PS, has been left ‘pending’. The town has taken note. Trudeau and his entourage got this wrong.

Most of Ottawa missed Mendelsohn’s appointment as deputy secretary in PCO, probably because it was made two days before Christmas. He’s heading a new secretariat called “results and delivery”, the re-branded Priorities and Planning secretariat reporting to the cabinet committee on “agenda and results”, the former P&P inner cabinet committee chaired by the PM.

As a younger prof in the mid-1990s, Mendelsohn took a leave of several years to work in PCO in the intergovernmental affairs secretariat during a period that included the 1995 Quebec referendum. In the mid-2000s, he took another leave from Queen’s to become a deputy minister in several portfolios at Queen’s Park during the Dalton McGuinty era. That makes him a close colleague of Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerry Butts, who held down the same role in McGuinty’s office during the time Mendelsohn was there.

Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, also worked at Queen’s Park during that period. Mendelsohn’s wife Kirsten Mercer, a former justice adviser to Premier Kathleen Wynne, is now chief of staff to Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. (How does the “results and delivery” secretariat talk to Justice when it needs a legal opinion on, say, democratic reform?)

Mendelsohn has impressive credentials as an academic, deputy minister and public intellectual. The Mowat Centre, in the six short years since he founded it, has done some important work and has become one of the country’s leading think-tanks. He took a leave to work on the 2015 Liberal campaign and was one of the authors of the Liberal platform. And as The Ottawa Citizen’s outstanding public service beat writer Kathryn May noted in a mid-January profile, “he also worked with Trudeau’s transition team to help craft Trudeau’s mandate letters for ministers — fittingly penning the passages about how ministers will be expected to track and report on government priorities.”

Which makes him, as the Citizen headline put it, “Trudeau’s go-to guy”.

It also helps explain the changing of the guard in PCO this week — but it does not explain why Charette has been treated so shabbily by PMO. One explanation may be the Liberals’ annoyance at the fact that PCO issued orders-in-council during the lame duck period, approving 33 Conservative appointments to government boards that took effect only after the election. As if a clerk of PCO could say no to a prime minister.

In his statement from Davos, Trudeau had the good sense to thank Charette “for her exemplary service to Canada”, as well as for guiding “the public service through an election year and my government through a seamless transition.”

But it’s not a seamless transition in PCO, far from it. In the normal course of events, Trudeau would have waited until the summer, allowing her more than just 15 months on the job.

There’s a protocol for how former clerks are treated. Usually they are named privy councillors, meaning they are known as “the Honourable”. As for what they do next, that normally depends on what they want to do. An appointment to a Canadian embassy in a G7 country is one option, as was the case with Mel Cappe, named high commissioner to London by Jean Chrétien in 2002, and Alex Himelfarb, named ambassador to Rome by Harper in 2006. Other clerks, such as Paul Tellier and Lynch, decided on business careers.

When Brian Mulroney asked Tellier what he wanted to do after seven years as clerk in 1992, he replied that he wanted to lead the privatization of CN, which he did brilliantly as CEO over the next decade. Lynch opted for a career on Bay Street as vice-chair of BMO and a corporate director, while developing his work for universities and think-tanks. Charette, highly popular with her staff and well regarded by the PS, has been left “pending”. The town has taken note.

Trudeau and his entourage got this wrong. They got something else wrong this week in his keynote speech at Davos. “My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources,” he declared. “I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness.” A lovely turn of phrase, but completely the wrong note.

It is very inappropriate to take domestic political differences abroad, and to personalize them like that. It’s considered very bad form to trash a former opponent in an international setting. It’s time for Team Trudeau to stop campaigning and start governing. In other words, it’s time for “results and delivery”.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of five books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.