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Gerein: Blake Desjarlais’s hiring at Edmonton city hall was a puzzler. So is his exit after just 90 days.

Blake Desjarlais’s abrupt departure after just three months as Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack’s chief of staff is a strange turn of events

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The world of politics, as I’ve learned over the years, is rife with dark humour, including an ongoing joke that senior staffers probably shouldn’t make themselves overly comfortable in any new office.

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Being a chief of staff or a director of communications is a tough, grinding gig at the best of times, and these are hardly the best of times. Such jobs are especially precarious in an era of social media excess and hyper-politicization where winning is everything, loyalty is paramount and each success or failure is blown out of proportion.

When things go well, people are poached to bigger stages. When they go poorly, staffers often take the hit for the elected officials they serve. Few make a career out of it.

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