OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will seek to put a stopper in the spinning door outside of his director of communications office by appointing a long-time loyalist to the position.
Harper did not have to go far to fill the job. Dimitri Soudas, currently the prime minister's official spokesman, will take on the job of spinner-in-chief. He does so just days after Harper turfed junior cabinet minister Helena Guergis from caucus and called in the Mounties to investigate unnamed allegations against her.
The new director of communications has worked for Harper for eight years when few gave the Calgary economist and ex-MP much of a chance of being prime minister, and has remained one of his closest and most faithful aides.
"I am honoured that the prime minister has asked me to take on this added responsibility," said Soudas on Sunday evening.
Soudas takes over from John Williamson and becomes Harper's fifth director of communications in five years.
"He knows the prime minister very well, the prime minister likes and trusts him, and I think that's one of the most important things," said former director of communications Kory Teneycke.
"If you don't have that relationship, I think it would be very difficult to function fully in the job and I think he has that in spades."
Soudas, 30, has had a tempestuous relationship with the parliamentary press pack and is a fierce defender of his boss's interests.
His passionate partisanship has also landed him in hot water. Soudas was too quick to blame environmentalist Steven Guilbeault for besmirching Canada's reputation with a phoney email campaign at the Copenhagen summit on climate change in December in a heated exchange caught on camera. A satirical group known as the Yes Men were actually behind the campaign.
In another incident, Soudas was forced to apologize for passing along false information to Harper about comments Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff had made.
Harper had taken the information and attacked Ignatieff's patriotism, not realizing his rival had never made the comments in the first place.
Earlier this year, Soudas was forced to take down his Facebook page after he accepted a wanted criminal as his friend. A satirical Quebec news program had faked the friend request, and suggested that Soudas could have been causing a security risk by including personal photos of his family on the social networking site.
Soudas, a bilingual Quebecer, has also been Harper's key Quebec adviser and spokesperson since they won government in 2006.
His ties to the Action Democratique du Quebec (ADQ) party have sometimes put him at odds with Tories in the province who are supporters of Premier Jean Charest's Liberals.
A government source told The Canadian Press Sunday that Soudas has signalled he would like to change the government's communication's strategy in his new role, directing ministerial staff to make their bosses more accessible to the media in a more timely fashion.