This week’s column is focusing on departures.

Zachary Nixon said he’s leaving the Prime Minister’s Office to pursue a new opportunity overseas.

In a post on LinkedIn, Nixon said Friday was his last day as the PM’s Ontario regional advisor and he was “moving to Copenhagen to embrace a new challenge.”

Nixon got his start in politics in 2018, when he joined then-Toronto Liberal MP Bill Blair’s office. In 2019, he made the leap to join fellow Toronto MP Mary Ng and later that year he was named as her special assistant for Ontario when she was named the minister of small business, export promotion and international trade.

He stayed with Ng until Sept. 2023, moving up the ranks to become a senior advisor.

Ng lost her small business portfolio when it was severed and turned into a stand-alone title in the summer 2023 shuffle. Rechie Valdez was then named small business minister and Nixon joined soon after as the director of operations.

Finally, Nixon joined the PMO as Ontario regional advisor in July 2024.

Meanwhile, Vincent Desmarais said he’s leaving the Conservative leader’s office.

In a post on X on Aug. 1, he said he was returning to Quebec for personal and family reasons.

Desmarais had spent the past two and a half years as Pierre Poilievre’s director of communications and political advisor for Quebec.

He said he still had confidence that Poilievre was the right person to lead the party but was moving back to Quebec to “pursue the most conservative project of all: getting married, becoming a homeowner, and starting a family in a beautiful home, in a safe neighbourhood, under a proud Quebec flag.”