Gerald Butts
| Gerald Butts | |
|---|---|
Butts in November 2015
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| Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister | |
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Assumed office November 2015 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
Gerald Michael Butts July 8, 1971 Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Spouse(s) | Jodi (Heimpel) Butts |
| Residence | Westboro, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
| Alma mater |
York University McGill University |
Gerald Michael Butts (born July 8, 1971) is the senior political adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Since November 2015, he has been the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister. From 2008 to 2012, he was president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Canada, a global conservation organization. In 2014, Maclean's magazine declared Butts to be the fourteenth most powerful Canadian.
Butts grew up in the Bridgeport neighbourhood of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, with three older brothers and one older sister. He is the son of Charles William "Charlie" Butts, a coal miner who was 56 years old when Butts was born and retired when Butts was 6 years old, and Rita Monica (Yorke) Butts, a nurse and a first-generation Canadian daughter of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. He attended Bridgeport School (now closed) and then St. Michael's High School (now a junior high school).
He received a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. It was at McGill that he was introduced to Justin Trudeau by a mutual friend. There, he was also elected president of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate and won the national debating championships two years in a row. He briefly attended York University to pursue a Ph.D.
In 1999, Butts became a policy director within the Government of Ontario. He was the policy secretary, and later the principal secretary, in the office of the then premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, in Toronto. Prior to the 2007 election, Butts was a McGuinty insider. After the election, he became McGuinty’s principal adviser. As one of his biographical notes describes it, Butts "was intimately involved in all of the government’s significant environmental initiatives, from the Greenbelt and Boreal Conservation plan to the coal phase-out and toxic reduction strategy."
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