PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MAJOR
If you couldn’t immediately place the man in this photograph as one of the most powerful in federal politics, don’t beat yourself up. When Guy Giorno, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, made a rare public appearance recently to testify before a House committee looking into government secrecy, even some veteran Parliament Hill news photographers needed to have him pointed out so they would know which way to aim their lenses.
Giorno’s spotlight-shy style makes him an unfamiliar figure, but the issues he’s intimately caught up in couldn’t be more conspicuous. In the past, critics inside the Conservative party have grumbled that his bad advice led to missteps by Stephen Harper—sparking a public backlash when the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament in January, and bringing the Tories to the brink of defeat in late 2008 when the opposition formed a coalition over the threat of losing their federal subsidies.
On the other hand, senior Tories credit Giorno as a key architect of last year’s budget, and the aggressive marketing of it as “Canada’s Economic Action Plan”—a springboard for the Conservatives’ bounce in the polls this spring. Insiders also say he whipped the Prime Minister’s Office into shape. “People can pick apart and second-guess individual tactical decisions that impact the Ottawa news cycle,” says Patrick Muttart, Harper’s former deputy chief of staff, now managing director of a Chicago-based public strategy firm, “but Giorno has gotten the big things right.”
Sometimes, however, predicting when this week’s tactical decision might turn into next month’s unwelcome big thing is not easy. As a devout Catholic whose faith has never been far from the centre of his politics, Giorno is assumed to have played a role in the government’s decision to ban foreign aid funding for abortions. It was controversial from the outset, but the move has grown to cast a huge shadow over Harper’s bid to make “maternal and child health” in developing countries his signature cause when he hosts the G8 and G20 summits in Huntsville, Ont., and Toronto next month.
Perhaps more than any issue that’s arisen in Giorno’s nearly two years as Harper’s top adviser, outlawing overseas abortion funding threatens to drag him unwillingly toward the centre of media attention. (Giorno declined to be interviewed for this story.) Montreal’s Le Devoir reported a few days ago that an unhappy Harper wants the matter defused before world leaders, many of whom disagree with his stance, arrive in Ontario for the summits. But Giorno is reportedly worried about how Conservative supporters would react to any retreat and is urging Harper to “protect the base.”
The debate draws attention not only to Giorno’s personal beliefs, but also to his political instincts. Preparing for a global summit like the annual G8 and G20 meetings is the ultimate in prestige politics—exciting to insiders, but remote from ordinary voters. As a one-time top aide to former Ontario Tory premier Mike Harris, Giorno has long been skeptical of political showcases that matter most to the sort of sophisticates who never gave Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution” much respect. “He has deeply rooted conservative principles and an affinity to populism,” says Kory Teneycke, Harper’s former communications director. “He’s an insider now, but this is not someone who went to Upper Canada College.”
Indeed, there’s no private-school gloss on Giorno. Born in 1965, he grew up middle-class in Toronto’s Etobicoke suburb. By the time he graduated from high school in 1983, he had already settled into the staunch conservatism and activist Catholicism that still define his political persona. Graduating from the University of Toronto’s law school in 1989, he wrote speeches for Harris in his 1990 run for the provincial Tory leadership. He went on to serve as an adviser and then chief of staff in the premier’s office after Harris’s victory in the 1995 Ontario election. Before and after working for Harris, Giorno practised law in Toronto, specializing in lobbying, access to information and conflict of interest matters, as well as strategic communications and crisis management.
Harper recruited Giorno two years ago this month, but his new talent didn’t land in Ottawa until the summer of 2008. They didn’t know each other well before then. Giorno brought a reputation as both an economic and social conservative, along with a Harris-style sense that politicians, especially once they’re in power, too often lapse into jargon instead of making their convictions plain to the public. “Don’t use technical language,” Giorno once said, “to describe a virtue.”
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