Prime Minister Mark Carney's director of communications, Jane Deeks, is leaving in the new year. Deeks, who came over to Carney's office from Justin Trudeau's, where she ran digital strategy, signed off with a finisher's line: "Time to run through the tape." She has held the top communications job in the Prime Minister's Office since March 2025 — through the Liberal leadership race, the general election, and Carney's first year in government.
Why is she going? On the record, no reason has been given — no new job announced, no dismissal reported — and her own sign-off frames the move as a race finished rather than a push: the tape is the finish line, and she is running through it. What surrounds the timing is not in dispute. Her departure landed in the same week CTV reported that Ottawa officials sat in on more than a dozen meetings about Stellantis — after Industry Minister Mélanie Joly had sworn the government "didn't participate in any form of negotiation." Days earlier, Stellantis announced the sale of its Brampton assembly plant to defence maker Roshel, a deal Carney himself called "unacceptable" and a betrayal of the workers, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stood in front of that plant demanding that Carney fire Joly over it.
A communications director is the person who absorbs exactly this kind of week: a minister's words on the record, and the meeting logs pointing the other way. Whether Deeks's exit was planned long before or this week's receipts finished the argument is not something anyone has said publicly, and this article does not pretend otherwise. What is known is that the voice Carney's government speaks with changes in the new year — in the middle of the auto fight that may define its first term.
For Canadian families, the stakes sit in Brampton and Windsor, where thousands of auto jobs hang on what Ottawa does next about Stellantis — and the fight is bound up with the United States, the cross-border auto industry and the tariff pressure that has squeezed it all year. The person whose job was explaining the government's side of that fight to the public is now working her notice.
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