Gerald Michael Butts (born July 8, 1971) is a Canadian political consultant who served as the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from November 4, 2015 until his resignation on February 18, 2019. From 2008 to 2012, he was president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Canada, part of a global conservation organization. In 2014, Maclean's magazine declared Butts to be the fourteenth most powerful Canadian. As the former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Butts was praised as the architect behind the Liberal Party of Canada platform that led to its victory in October of 2015 and was one of the most senior staffers in the Office of the Prime Minister, along with Katie Telford. Early life and education 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 closed). 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. Career Upon graduating from McGill University, his first job was working as a research assistant in the Senate office of Allan MacEachen. There, he helped organize MacEachen's past correspondence for the purposes of his intended memoirs (which in the event were never written). 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