Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor breaks the news: Today, Sandra Buckler (left) informed her friends and colleagues that she’ll be leaving the Prime Minister’s office as Director of Communications.... Her skills impressed Stephen Harper and the Prime-Minister-elect hired her on as his Comms boss. When she took the job of communications director to Harper in March of 2006, few members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery knew who she was and almost all gave her a few months -- tops -- before Harper would fire her, as he had done to William Stairs (the comms director who got him through the election successfully), or Geoff Norquay before him (technically quit but the Grewal affair may have exhausted him) or Jim Armour before him.

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper's micro-shuffle today involved David Emerson, Michael Fortier, Christian Paradis, and James Moore. It is Harper's fourth cabinet configuration. Here's some numbers on the current set-up: Positions: Prime Minister: 1 Ministers: 26 Secretarys of State: 5 Gender: Men: 25 Women: 6 Stability: There are nine ministers who have the same jobs they had from Harper's original cabinet of February, 2006: Harper (PM), Blackburn (Labour), Thompson (Veterans Affairs), Lunn (Natural Resources), Clement (Health), Flaherty (Finance), Hearn (Fisheries), Day (Public Safety), Cannon (Transport).

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OK, reading what I already wrote, OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will appoint "new members of the Ministerial team" Wednesday morning, in a widely expected fine-tuning of his cabinet triggered by the resignation last month of former Foreign Affairs minister Maxime Bernier. The new ministers will be sworn in at Rideau Hall, the official residence of the Governor General, at 11 a.m. Christian Paradis, a rookie MP from Quebec who is the Secretary of State for Agriculture, is the likely candidate to get the job of International Trade minister, leaving the incumbent, David Emerson, free to focus on the Foreign Affairs portfolio, a job handed to him on an interim basis in the wake of Bernier's resignation...

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A PMO source says Prime Minister Harper will halve David Emerson's workload -- he is both Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of International Trade (as well as carrying the regional portfolios of the 2010 Olympics and Pacific Gateway) -- before Canada Day.... In the third and final installment in that magazine's June issue, he has this MP's-eye view of the rumour and speculation the press here have been involved in recently on this issue: It’s not clear which is psychologically worse: getting bounced from Cabinet or being passed over for a position.... Grown men and women, accomplished and respected in their fields before coming to Ottawa, are reduced to nervous, insecure children when the rumours start flying about a Cabinet shuffle.

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I'm on the record that it will be a shuffle of precisely one: Rookie MP Christian Paradis to get a big bump up to International Trade before the end of the week. Others here in Ottawa tell me that briefing books have been prepared over in Human Resources.... If he's moving, that's a big shuffle and I'd tend to believe what the PM said last week about big shuffles.

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Les Edition de L'Homme is the publishing house owned by Quebecor Inc., which also owns the television network TVA where Couillard first spilled the beans about her relationship with Maxime Bernier. No word on when, but presumably we'll see it in time for the fall publishing season and, possibly, just in time for a fall federal election: MONTREAL, June 20 /CNW/ - The autobiography of Julie Couillard will be published this fall by Canada's largest independent English-language publishing house, McClelland & Stewart, and the largest publishing house in Quebec, Les Editions de l'Homme.... From her childhood experiences to her meeting with the President of the United States at the side of Canada's chief diplomat, and the tragic death of her companion in the infamous biker gang wars in the mid 1990s, Julie Couillard will reveal the details of a life marked by both tragedy and exhilaration.   more »

Also: When Harper is doing press conferences within Canada but outside of Ottawa, his handlers tend to let everyone get a question in. When it's just the Parliamentary Press Gallery -- in Ottawa or on a foreign trip -- things are a little more tightly controlled and not everyone who wants to ask him something is going to get that chance.... In any event, knowing that Harper is well-briefed and tough to surprise, a smart question, in my view, is one that forces him to think on the spot a bit, to move away from the prepared lines and, if you're successful, to get him to open up a bit more about a given issue.... Harper had the last laugh, of course, when the campaign ended but I go back to that as a good example of a question that elicits an answer that gets beyond the spin and the highly scripted performances because it showed, in a pretty demonstrative way, that Harper was still having a tough time with the "retail" side of politics, the regular guy stuff that helps a politician connect with voters.

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The survey of 2,251 Americans also finds that the number going online for political news and information has doubled in this election cycle compared to the 2004 race, from 8 per cent to 17 per cent. Not surprisingly, the poll found that use of new digital technologies to campaign and to learn about campaigns tends to be greatest among younger voters.... The poll found that 39 per cent of online Americans are using the Internet to get access to original campaign documents or video of speeches and announcements.

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In Guelph, the NDP brings in Jack Layton Friday for a full day of politicking while the Conservatives will soon bring in big guns like John Baird and Diane Finley to support their candidate for a yet-to-be announced by-election.

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A correspondent writes from Guelph: "I heard one of the anti-Dion ads (slagging the concept of carbon taxes if I recall) on Magic 106 this morning on my drive from Guelph to Kitchener..."

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