Twice before, Stephen Harper overhauled the team around him as he prepared to meet a new challenge. In November 2001, as a candidate for the Canadian Alliance leadership, he fired the high-priced professional campaigners he had put on the payroll only three months earlier and turned the campaign over to his inexperienced but highly motivated friends. In July of 2005, as an Opposition leader who had failed to bring down Paul Martin's minority government, he replaced his chief of staff and fired much of his organization. The first overhaul, according to the Harper camp's household mythology, made him a party leader. The second made him prime minister.

And now he is doing it again.

Staffers at the Prime Minister's Office were on tenterhooks for weeks before Guy Giorno took over as Stephen Harper's second chief of staff, replacing the man Harper installed in 2005, Ian Brodie, who resigned but still helped plan the latest reorganization. From his first day on the job, on July 2, Giorno wasted no time cleaning house.

The PMO had three deputy chiefs of staff; two had cleared out their desks before the weekend; Keith Beardsley at "issues management" and Roseanna Whissell at "operations." Subordinates followed both out the exit. Ministerial staffers across the capital have been told to expect more firings. So-called directors of parliamentary affairs, who help steer their bosses' agendas through the Commons and Senate, have been told "the centre" — Giorno, acting on detailed advice Brodie left him — has confidence in only one-third of them.

Harper and Giorno have embarked on a major housecleaning designed to give the Conservatives new focus and flexibility as a federal election approaches. It will be the first election Harper has had to fight as an incumbent prime minister. He never thought his tenuous minority government would last this long. But since Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has been gracious enough to grant Harper a summer's respite from an election, Harper does not intend to waste it.

Sources say that at his first meeting with PMO staff, Giorno, a Toronto lawyer who served as chief of staff to former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris, sat through a brief introduction from Harper before telling staff that when the Commons reconvenes at the end of September, Canada will be at most a year away from a general election. Now, Giorno said, the government will be in permanent pre-election mode until the Liberals and other opposition parties bring them down, or until Harper himself reaches the fall 2009 fixed-election date he set in law in 2006.

What will the new focus look like? "Leaner, less bureaucratic, less focus on day-to-day management of government," one senior Conservative said. "We've got a professional public service to take care of that stuff. Guy said, 'Let's all remember that we are political staffers; we are not administrators.' " Giorno's title is chief of staff to the Prime Minister, but "he will interpret that as being chief of staff to the Conservative Party of Canada."

As if to emphasize that change, Harper's new PMO has a new spokesman: Kory Teneycke, a former ethanol-industry lobbyist who has worked in Preston Manning's old Reform party, in Harris's Ontario government while Giorno was there, and for the Saskatchewan Party before it ousted the province's long-standing NDP government. But Teneycke's most recent and significant assignment was running the Conservative Resource Group. That 37-member shop, separate from both the PMO and Conservative party headquarters, runs almost constant Internet attacks against the Dion Liberals. Teneycke helped mastermind an elaborate campaign to discredit Dion's most important proposal, the so-called "Green Shift," which would combine a carbon tax with income-tax cuts.

Teneycke replaces Sandra Buckler, whose secretive style and awesome control — every on-the-record public statement by every cabinet minister, Conservative MP and every diplomat in Canada's foreign service had to be cleared by her in advance — made her the bane of Ottawa reporters' existence. Teneycke has a tricky dual assignment. He hopes to smooth the press gallery's ruffled feathers, even as he helps ramp up the PMO's election readiness.

To accomplish the first goal, Teneycke plans to loosen the PMO's legendary control over communications. Ministerial spokesmen handling calls from reporters will be free — well, freer — to decide how to respond, even if only with a prompt, cheerful "no comment." (Two years under Buckler have ill-prepared many ministers' helpers for this dizzying level of autonomy. Many will be replaced before the new rules come into effect.)

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