When Max Valiquette started working for Justin Trudeau in late 2023, he knew the job would be tough. At home, the Prime Minister’s popularity was way down, and there was growing dissension within the MP ranks. Meanwhile, an already unstable global landscape was responding to new tragedies in Israel and Gaza, while an historic U.S. election was on the horizon.
“It starts with a war in the Middle East, and it just ramps up from there, culminating in Trump winning the election, and a very different bat-shit crazy last four months than my first four months,” he said of his tumultuous time as executive communications director for the office of the Prime Minister.
Valiquette went in with a good understanding of the realities of politics and the magnitude of what he was being asked to do—“I'm not sure that it would have been possible for anyone to have another term… Winning four elections is not something that has happened in modern Canadian history”—but took the job anyway.
And one of the things he learned quickly is that in the Prime Minister's Office, with new urgent demands and requests incoming at a relentless pace, being proactive instead of reactive is almost impossible. “You’d tear up your to-do list by 7:45 in the morning,” he says. But in a recent wide-ranging interview with Campaign about his 16 months at the PMO, Valiquette also emphasized just how much he valued his time there: “Best job I’ve ever had,” he said.
Valiquette actually grew up in Ottawa, and was friendly with the future Prime Minister and his two brothers when they were all children riding around the neighbourhood on their bicycles (see photographic evidence below). But he built his career in Toronto advertising, spending more than two decades earning a reputation as a top strategic thinker with an entrepreneurial bent, a confident public speaker with a particular penchant for pop culture and media. (More than one pop music reference was made during his discussion with Campaign.)
His time in the PMO ended in March, when Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership and was soon after sworn in as Canada’s new Prime Minister.
The goal of our interview wasn’t to deconstruct specific moments or crucial actions and policy decisions of the Trudeau government, but to explore how he viewed the experience through the lens of a long-time ad executive and communications professional.
He talked openly and candidly about his time at the PMO, including why he took the job, what he found most challenging, how he worked with the Trudeau brand (all in Part I), the importance of social media and what he learned from the experience (Part II).
Please note this interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Why did you take this job, aside from wanting to be in public service? Did you think much about what you hoped to accomplish or learn, or where it made sense for you as the next step in your career, or was it just about believing in what Justin Trudeau was doing?
I 100% believe in public service, and had been involved in [Trudeau’s] first campaign a tiny little bit in 2015, I had done some work for the Liberal Party on personal branding for MPs and stuff like that. I had worked on probably every single provincial government file, frankly, so I also understood government communication.
And the idea behind the job was that it wouldn't be director of communications, it would be executive director of communications, which actually held three areas in it that weren't straight ahead comms—meaning government comms is speech writing, media relations, all of that kind of stuff.
This also had advertising, research and digital underneath it as well. So I felt very strongly that my experience in all four of those areas might make me unique for this job.
At the time, obviously, things were going quite poorly [for the government], so that meant they were open to new approaches. It's why they brought in someone from outside the bubble.
I was super aware—as much as I could be—of the difficulties of the whole thing, of course, but it's a call to serve. And I don't really think I ever thought about not doing it. I had a conversation with my partner, and that was very quickly, logistically: ‘What does this mean for the family? How do we make this work?’ Not, ‘Should you go do this?’
And I say this to anyone who asks, it was the hardest job I've ever had by a factor of 10 to one, and it was the best job I've ever had by a factor of 100 to 1.
Hardest because of the hours, or the sheer challenge of what you were being asked to do?
May I choose all of the above? The hours are bonkers. I've worked for demanding bosses, I've run my own business, I've worked for quote-unquote family owned businesses, which kind of never sleep in their own way, right? Yeah, this was the most sheer hours of work ever.
It also was the craziest ping-ponging from the massive to the minute in no time at all: You could be sitting around a table having a conversation about redirecting aid funding to the Gaza Strip, and then you're approving a tweet for a misplaced comma. It was literally like that, but it was awesome.
It also truly is not a job that ends, to the point where I had staff who would say things like, ‘I'm going to be offline the next hour and a half’ in a way that I've never encountered before, because you needed to know where people were all the time and things would happen on a global stage, and you just had to be able to respond to them, period.
Is it possible to identify the biggest challenge for you, for the government, in terms of communications? Was there something you felt like the public misunderstood about Justin Trudeau or his government and you struggled to clarify or change that which you would consider a misperception?
I'll say a couple of things. One is, I truly wish that every Canadian could spend 24 hours just at PMO seeing how hard everybody works, how committed everybody is, and the way the machine actually works.
The biggest misconception, period, is less [about] how things work, and more of a misconception I think people have of themselves and how they work, versus how government needs to work.
The thing that you care about for you is the most important thing for you, and you probably don't have to worry about how anybody else feels about it.
But government—especially responsible government that's looking to take care of all of its citizens—compromises every day, every way, all the time, right?
So as soon as anything was going to happen, literally anything anywhere, there would be calls coming in from constituent groups, from these parties, from representatives of their communities. And these aren’t bad calls to get. This is what should be happening, but we're never doing one thing, thinking only about that one thing. It just doesn't work that way.
Frame that for me as a communications challenge to be overcome? Or is it impossible? It sounds like you're talking about how everyone is just so negative and critical about government in general these days—how they don't trust government. Can that be overcome? Did you think much about how you, as a communicator, could solve that?
Yeah, it's a great question. I had some more immediate fixes. For instance, I think what people probably noticed most quickly during my tenure was how the PM’s digital voice changed, and the effectiveness of our digital communications, and how all of that was something different.
What I would have loved Canadians to have understood more is the level of commitment my boss has to the country, how strongly he feels about Canada, and about doing what's right for Canada, and the extent to which a party that is fundamentally more centrist than the others is torn in two directions trying to make sure that that the centre is as wide as possible, if that makes sense.
If I was still working there, I think the idea of a CMO for the Canadian government is actually not a bad one, to be honest. And I approached the job a little bit like that as well.
There's anywhere from $70 to $100 million dollars in advertising running through the federal government… And I believe in the power of communications, I believe in the power of advertising, and I also believe that Canadians have a right to know what is happening [with their government].
But the advertising process in the federal government is not designed to produce ads quickly. The last two campaigns I worked on were the Rick Mercer “Choose Canada” campaign, and then the “Tariffs are a tax on Americans” billboard campaign that we did in the U.S. What was amazing with those is how quickly they happened.
We had an entire country together. We had a cause every Canadian, it feels like, supports. We're all rallying around this, and then the very mechanism with which we are best suited to convince Americans that tariffs are bad for them is one that normally would take us 180 days to do, something crazy like that.
So there's that as a potential area for change that I would have liked to see.
Quicker advertising Max, but can I also suggest—aside maybe from the campaigns you just mentioned—generally speaking, the Canadian Government isn’t known for great advertising.
Yeah, and again, this is not a knock on anyone down there. There's an embedded process that simply isn't designed to make great ads.
The ASC reviews all campaigns of more than $500,000 at two different junctures, and can kind of give a go or no go. There's not another advertiser that operates that way.
The RFP process isn't designed to make agencies work quickly or work well. PMO would be involved, and I think my particular kind of expertise was important, and I think well received there, but it's Ministries and obviously departments—the non-partisan working part of the government that is more responsible for that advertising—and the way the process works is a literal 15,000 word RFP going out to agencies, in fact, often just going out to sort of one of the next agencies down the list of approved vendors.
I've never gotten a 15,000-word brief from a client before. We talk a lot about single-minded messaging. It's really hard to turn 15,000 words into a single minded message, right?
But I would say the area most in need of fundamental change is probably misinformation and disinformation. And I would say that an interesting challenge is the opposition—specifically the opposition on the right more than anywhere else— I understand some people will disagree with me on this, and that's fine—but I think [the right] doesn't have the same compunctions about misinformation or disinformation, and certainly, whether they're doing it themselves or not, don't seem to feel the need to take responsibility for bad actors and their networks.
We can see language from Canada Proud and from True North, and from all of those groups, work its way from what they're saying online into the literal lines of script being spoken by members of the opposition party in question period. There's a hansard that's a record of all of this.
So I think that if one is fundamentally running on an anti-government campaign, or [suggesting] that government is screwing you over, government is too big, too intrusive, too everything, you're less concerned about trust in institutions. And in fact, you might benefit from a mistrust in institutions, at which point misinfo and disinfo can become extraordinarily helpful.
I want to get into social media and bad information a little bit more (see Part II) but before we do, can you tell me did you go into this job thinking of Justin Trudeau as a brand, or his government as a brand? Or can you not even approach this kind of work in that way?
Yes. If it's a house of brands, as it were, his would be the dominant brand within the house. You then have a lot of other ministers, more than MPs, but a few MPs, maybe, who are brands of their own to some extent, but none of them equal to his brand. You then have the brand of the Liberal party that is probably affected more by the leader’s brand than the other way around.
And brand is not a dirty word for me. I don't think it is for you, but you know, some people sort of look at that language [in politics] and reject it for being too commercial and maybe even a little too Machiavellian, maybe even a little too contrived. I don't. Obviously, I have zero issue with it whatsoever.
So just from a brand perspective, I do think there was something really interesting and really strong [about Trudeau] to work with, but also a very good example of what can happen to any brand… I think in 2015 his personal brand was a game changer for the party and elevated it entirely, in the same way the feeling was that in 2024, his personal brand was an issue for the party. I always think the answer is going to end up having some nuance to it.
Do you think that brands in politics, more than business, have a shelf life?
There's absolutely no question about that. And 10 years does seem to be some kind of a ceiling. I've said this on more than one occasion… I didn't take the job to leave it in April, right? It was supposed to have a term that ended in October, and then maybe went four more years after that.
I'm being really candid, it would have been hard [to win re-election]. Now, I did have a plan and a strategy, which I didn't exactly get to fully put in place or even fully work through, I think there would have had to have been a kind of 180-degree reintroduction of Justin Trudeau to the Canadian people.
I can't tell you with 100% certainty one way or the other where it would have gone. It would have obviously been an enormous uphill battle. What I will say is it's fun sometimes for me to talk to people about where things ended up, and ask them where they think things ended up, because at the end of it all, what you can look at is Justin Trudeau’s approval rating and his net approval rating on his last day, and it was significantly better than Pierre Poilievre for the first time in a long while.
As low as his numbers were just before he resigned, it sounds like you think you had the plan for the October election where you could have revived the Trudeau brand.
I mean, that's the job, right? And he chose not to run again. So again, do I think it would have been an easy win? No. Do I think it was necessarily even possible? That's a hard one, right?
Like again, 10 years may just be anybody's shelf life. But he left with 45 approved, 47 disapproved for a net negative two, which for a sitting PM is terrific.
Now you know before that, I think he had been something like a net negative 50 or something bonkers like that. But again, asking someone ‘Do you approve or disapprove of this job?’, even asking the big question ‘If the election were called tomorrow, who would you vote for?’ Well, that's kind of an impossible thing for [someone] to answer properly. I mean, they can answer that question, but the election won't be tomorrow. In fact, it'll be a minimum of a number of weeks after it's called, and there will be all this campaigning that happens after it's called. It's incredible to me, the number of people who would have suggested they were going to vote for Pierre Poilievre, and the guy didn't win his own riding.
