‘There’s very little over the course of decades of service that she has not experienced in terms of bombast’

In The Logic’s latest The Big Read, Marci Surkes reflects on what sets Janice Charette apart after decades at the centre of Canada’s most complex moments.

That kind of experience isn’t theoretical. It’s built over years of navigating pressure, personalities, and high-stakes decisions at the centre of government.

You can read the full article below from Joanna Smith:

OTTAWA — Janice Charette likes to hear from others before she makes an important judgment call, inviting the views of colleagues as though seated around a family dinner table. But these days, fewer and fewer decisions can wait. Shortly before retiring as Canada’s top bureaucrat in June 2023, Charette described the current era of political and economic upheaval as one of permanent “polycrisis,” a relentless series of interconnected global events that often demand fast action from those at the highest levels of government.

When she needs to move quickly, Charette goes on instinct. “You spend your whole life refining your gut,” she told a Global Affairs Canada podcast in 2018, “to actually be what gets you through the tough spots.” So far, she said, her gut has served her well.

Charette, 63, will now help guide Canada through one of its toughest spots yet. Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney named the veteran public servant as chief trade negotiator to the United States just as the North American trade agreement comes up for review. She is working closely with Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador in Washington, D.C. Charette, who declined to be interviewed for this story, led Carney’s transition team after he won the 2025 Liberal leadership race and replaced Justin Trudeau as prime minister.

She is no stranger to turbulent times. Her nearly four decades in the federal civil service included two stints as clerk of the Privy Council, leading the administrative nerve centre that supports the cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). She began in 2014 when Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was in power, and was just over two weeks into the job when a gunman stormed Parliament Hill. Charette continued in the role through the transition to the Liberal government led by Trudeau, who later named her Canada’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom shortly after the country voted to leave the European Union. In 2021, Trudeau asked her to return as interim clerk during the COVID-19 pandemic, when then-clerk Ian Shugart went on medical leave. She was in the role permanently the next year.

It is not an exaggeration to say she has been on the frontline of history. Charette has described the role of clerk as that of a deputy minister to the prime minister. She held the job through the conclusion of the Pacific Rim trade negotiations, the Syrian refugee crisis, the “Freedom Convoy” protests, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the confidence-and-supply agreement between the Liberals and New Democrats, a two-week strike by the public service, and allegations of foreign interference by China, India and others. She dined at Windsor Castle as an overnight guest of Queen Elizabeth II. When the monarch died in 2022, Charette was the one to tell Trudeau.

“In incredibly busy and challenging and stressful times she remains calm and focused,” says Stephen Lucas, who was deputy minister of health from 2019 to 2024, and is now CEO of Mitacs, an innovation not-for-profit based in Vancouver. “She’s deliberate and thoughtful,” he says, as well as “resolute in terms of how she approaches things. Tough when she needs to be and empathetic when she needs to be—or just by nature.”

Charette was born in Ottawa and has lived most of her life in the national capital. Her father was a service technician for a gas utility. Her mother was a hair stylist, then stayed at home after her boss made her quit when she became pregnant with Charette, the eldest of her children. Years later, as Charette climbed the ranks of the public service, it was her husband, Reg, who stayed at home to care for their two children, Jed and Cassie.

Charette was the first in her family to go to university, completing a bachelor of commerce at Carleton University. She did not go to graduate school. Marci Surkes, a former executive director of policy and cabinet affairs in Trudeau’s PMO, describes her as a hometown girl—and a hockey mom—who worked her way up through the bureaucracy to its pinnacle. “There was nobody who did her any favours to get her there.”

One of Charette’s early jobs in the public service was as a departmental liaison with the office of then-finance minister Michael Wilson. It was shortly after a journalist reported key details of the 1989 federal budget before Wilson delivered it to Parliament. The reporter had obtained the document from a government employee, whose friend had found misprints at a recycling plant. Charette had to brief Wilson for question period in the House of Commons, where he faced heavy grilling. “I was there to help with the data side and facts,” she recalled. But she learned about politics, too. 

By the mid-1990s, she was handling other politically sensitive files at the Privy Council Office. Charette was part of a task force overseeing the closure of several military bases across Canada. She was also director of operations for the secretariat set up to help then-finance minister Paul Martin review which programs to cut in his bid to slash the deficit.

She left the public service for management consulting firm Ernst & Young, then served as chief of staff to Jean Charest when he led the federal Progressive Conservatives. She was a director on the transition team that started up the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and in 1999 took a senior role at the Department of Justice. That was rare for a non-lawyer, but the deputy minister at the time told Charette he was trying to change the culture of the organization to advance the policy agenda of the justice minister. A non-lawyer could help.

A few years later, Charette was again helping to build something new. She was associate deputy minister of health for Carolyn Bennett, who joined the cabinet as minister of state for public health in 2003. Bennett was tasked with setting up the Public Health Agency of Canada after the SARS outbreak. A family physician before she was elected to the House of Commons in 1997, Bennett was more of a policy wonk than a political organizer. She credits Charette with giving her the space and support she needed to set up a new agency in the way she thought was best.

“We needed evidence-based decisions and sometimes it was really important to have the support,” Bennett says, “when there were political pressures going a different way.” This helped Bennett become more confident, too. She recalls an official entering her office saying, “‘This is what you should do, but it would never apply politically.’ And I said,

‘Oh, my dear, that’s my job! Just tell me the facts,’” laughs Bennett, who is now Canada’s ambassador to Denmark. “Janice thought that was hysterical.”

Andrea van Vugt, who was foreign affairs and trade policy adviser to Harper when he was prime minister, remembers how seriously Charette took the caretaker convention, which requires the public service to stick to routine, essential or urgent business during an election period—avoiding political decisions that would bind a future government. It was 2015, and the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact had bled into the federal campaign, which at 11 weeks was one of the longest in Canadian history. The countries reached a deal just two weeks before the Oct. 19 vote, delivering the kind of victory any government of the day—in this case, the Conservatives—would want to claim.

That would not have been appropriate, van Vugt says. Charette knew it, but she also knew that the negotiations were in the best interest of Canada and that not being part of the agreement would come with a huge cost. Van Vugt says she admired how deftly Charette involved the political players as needed, while maintaining firm boundaries around the non-partisan negotiators as they did their jobs.

That is something van Vugt expects Charette will bring to this new role as she replaces Kirsten Hillman, who was both chief trade negotiator and ambassador to the U.S. “I think she is going to be able to separate the noise from what is actually happening,” says van Vugt, who is now in Calgary as chief operating officer for Wellington Advocacy, a lobby firm. “I cannot think of a more important characteristic for the chief negotiator in this particular negotiation.”

Alistair Burt once had North America within his portfolio at the U.K. Foreign Commonwealth Office, which landed him on the regular guest list for events at the Canadian High Commission in London. He struck up a friendship with Charette and since they were meeting unofficially, they could chat more frankly about domestic politics—especially as Canada was trying to sort out its new relationship with the U.K. after the Brexit vote.

“She was navigating a very, very difficult political atmosphere in the United Kingdom, where most of the political establishment, including me, were stunned and horrified at the vote, but realizing we had to get on with it,” says Burt, who is now pro-chancellor at Lancaster University. “Her personal style—making friends, very approachable—was of great benefit to her and to Canada.”

When she was back in Ottawa as clerk, Charette spoke with purpose and authority when cabinet had to make a decision, recalls Surkes, the former PMO staffer. “You can imagine the number of personalities around a table at cabinet,” says Surkes, who is now chief strategy officer at Compass Rose, an Ottawa-based public affairs and government relations firm. “There’s very little over the course of decades of service that she has not experienced in terms of bombast.” Charette herself is charming, Surkes adds, but focused on results. She once showed up at a meeting wearing a T-shirt that said: “No Drama Mama.”

At the centre of power, though, drama can be hard to avoid. In November 2022, Charette was in the spotlight during the public inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act to quell the weeks-long “Freedom Convoy” protests in downtown Ottawa. Headlines about her testimony focused on  a crucial memo she wrote to Trudeau recommending he invoke the legislation. Charette acknowledged in the memo that her conclusion that the level of threat justified use of the act “may be vulnerable to challenge.”

Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney challenged the constitutionality of the decision, but does not think Charette should be the one to wear it—or that it makes her unsuitable for her new role. “There is literally no one in Canada with more senior leadership experience in the public service, dealing with the most complex issues, systems, and crises,” he wrote last month on social media.

Granting the government emergency powers was not the only idea being hashed out during the chaotic time. Amid the blaring horns and steady questions from cabinet ministers asking what could be done, Charette had asked deputy ministers to “leave no stone unturned” when searching for solutions. “I would’ve been saying, ‘All hands on deck. No idea too crazy. Let’s look at absolutely everything,’” Charette testified. At one point, senior officials had even considered finding government employees with tow-truck licences to remove the semi-trailers from Wellington Street.

Jody Thomas, who was national security and intelligence adviser to Trudeau at the time, says Charette is always thinking several steps ahead. She saw this in the early days after Russia invaded Kyiv in February 2022. Involving the defence, foreign affairs and national security portfolios were obvious choices, but Charette also looped in departments responsible for heritage, immigration, employment and agriculture as she thought through how Ottawa might respond if the war stretched months—or years.

“That’s how broadly she thinks,” Thomas says.

She also thinks about her people. As Thomas was preparing for her own difficult testimony at the Emergencies Act inquiry, her father died. “Her check-ins, her support, her kindness, I can never repay,” says Thomas. “She helped me heal while allowing me the space to do my job. You don’t always get that from a boss.”

Charette wanted to make sure more people did. When Daron Richardson, a 14-year-old girl who played hockey with her daughter died by suicide in 2010, she has said it hit her like a “bolt of lightning” that made her want to do something about mental health. Charette, who became an officer of the Order of Canada last October, is credited with being the first clerk to make mental well-being a management priority, even linking workplace respect to performance pay for deputy ministers.

“When you’re in government, it can be exceptionally lonely,” says Surkes. Deadlines loom, pressure is high and the stakes can be monumental. The level of secrecy required prevents senior officials from going home and talking about what they did at the office that day. Yet it is not always easy to open up to colleagues. “Janice—with no need to do so—opened her door and her ears and her heart any time I needed to talk through something,” Surkes says. Charette was there with a bit of wisdom or, when needed, a shake of the head and the advice to snap out of it. “It wasn’t always sugar-coated,” Surkes says, “but it was always on offer, very selflessly.”