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.

Distroscale

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.

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One of the appointments was a 26 year-old named Tyler Albrecht, tasked with being Ontario’s Agent-General in NYC.

The bio described Albrecht as providing “corporate finance services to private companies seeking capital and many private placements, totaling more than $250 million.”

It left out his key qualification: he played lacrosse with French’s son.

Other than that, his resume is pretty thin.

I wouldn’t mind someone with a close, personal connection to French (or anyone else in government) getting a posting like this if they were qualified, but used a pumped-up bio as a means to justifying the appointment is nothing but BS.

By Friday morning, the premier’s office was contacting myself and others in the media to let them know that Albrecht’s appointment was being rescinded.

So too was the appointment of Taylor Shields as Ontario’s Agent-General in London, England.

Despite being assistant vice-president of marketing at Chubb Insurance, she’s also a relative of French’s wife.

A relative and a lacrosse buddy.

It doesn’t look good for a government that says it is for the people.

It doesn’t look good for a premier that once marketed himself as the man to end the gravy train.

Now the gravy train is being loaded up with his friends or those of his top advisor.

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There is a long-standing rule in politics that says when those in the background who serve the leader become the actual story, it is time for them to go.

French isn’t just the story today — he is regularly the story.

Some of the criticism has been unfair, but most of his appearances in the news were due to his own actions — like appointing people too close to you to high-profile positions, prompting taxpayers just squeezing by with $50-60,000 a year to wonder why they’re doling out a $165-185,000 salary on a 26-year-old Lacrosse buddy.

There have been people in the PC Party that have never liked French — most backers of other leadership rivals — but they aren’t the only ones calling for his departure.

People who would normally stand up for this government are saying they simply cannot defend these appointments.

In the grand scheme of things, these appointments should be a career-ender for a political operative but come at the end of months of problems.

And worse, they are embarrassing for his boss — the man he’s there to serve.

Premier Ford can’t move ahead on his agenda if his own top advisor is stealing headlines and creating scandals.

Maybe it’s time for French to take an appointment himself — go represent Ontario in New York, London or even Washington.

French needs to do the right thing and leave before Ford is forced to fire him.