It may be Family Day in Ontario, but it’s business as usual for the data entry crew over at Langevin Block, where the newly appointed, ostensibly non(or at least slightly less than hypermanic)partisan Paul Wilson has finally turned up in GEDS, where he is now listed as director of policy, just as foretold by the oracles of the Globe’s parliamentary bureau.
(For more on Wilson’s background, check out this Hill Times profile from last March, and try to rationalize to yourself how a longtime Reform/Alliance staffer who worked for both the Manning and Day OLOs, and was a “key player in writing of the 1997 and 2000 election platforms” could possibly be described as ‘nonpartisan’. Not that there’s anything wrong with not being nonpartisan, particularly when you work in politics.)
Stricken from the roll, meanwhile, is Lynette Corbett, who up until last week was listed as director of strategy under Patrick Muttart, whose omnipresence seems to fade a little more each day, like a Cheshire Cat without the grin.
UPDATE: As of Tuesday morning, Patrick Muttart is once again listed as a Deputy Chief of Staff, which makes us wonder what the official protocol is that decides whether he or Darrel Reid assumes active command of the office during those rare moments that the Giornoverseer General is out of BlackBerry range.
Meanwhile, today’s Hill Times has a slightly-less-obsessively-detailed-than-ITQ roundup of the major changes at PMO that were chronicled by GiornoWatch over the last week or so, which then somewhat inexplicably turns into a somewhat futile attempt to track down a single Conservative willing to give a scintilla of credence, on or off the record, to the theory that the Prime Minister may be considering shuffling himself out right out of the leadership before the next election. The short version: Fear not, caucus, for the PM still has “the grip” on y’all – but if it turns into a hug, you might consider panicking.
