John Turner
John Napier Wyndham Turner was the 17th prime minister of Canada, serving from June to September 1984. He served as leader of the Liberal Party and leader of the Opposition from 1984 to 1990.
Turner practised law before being elected as a member of Parliament in the 1962 federal election. He served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as minister of justice and attorney general from 1968 to 1972 and then as minister of finance from 1972 to 1975. As a cabinet minister, Turner came to be known as a leader of the Business Liberal faction of the Liberal Party. Amid a global recession and the prospect of having to implement unpopular wage and price controls, Turner resigned from his position in 1975.
From 1976 to 1984, Turner took a hiatus from politics, working as a corporate lawyer on Bay Street. Trudeau's resignation in 1984 triggered a leadership election, which Turner successfully contested. When he was sworn in as prime minister after winning the leadership election, Turner was not an MP or senator — the last time this would occur until Mark Carney in 2025. Turner held the office of prime minister for just 79 days, as he advised the governor general to dissolve Parliament soon after being sworn in. He went on to lose the 1984 election in a landslide to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives, leading the Liberals to the second-worst defeat for a governing party at the federal level. Turner stayed on as Liberal leader and led the Opposition for the next six years. In the 1988 election, he vigorously campaigned against Mulroney's proposed free trade agreement with the United States, and led the Liberals to a modest recovery. Turner resigned as party leader in 1990 and did not seek re-election as an MP in 1993.
Turner was Canada's first prime minister born in the United Kingdom since Mackenzie Bowell in 1896, Canada's second shortest-serving prime minister behind Charles Tupper, and Canada's fourth longest-lived prime minister, living to the age of 91.
Early life
Turner was born on June 7, 1929, in Richmond, Surrey, England, to Leonard Hugh Turner, an English journalist with the Manchester Guardian, and Phyllis Gregory, a Canadian economist. He had a brother, Michael, born in 1930, and a sister, Brenda, born in 1931. When Turner's father died in 1932, he and his sister moved to Canada with their Canadian-born mother. The family settled in her childhood home in Rossland, British Columbia, and later moved to Ottawa.Turner's mother was loving but demanding of her two children. The family was not wealthy. His mother remarried in 1945 to Frank Mackenzie Ross, who later served as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, and the family relocated to Vancouver.
Education
Turner was educated at Ashbury College and St Patrick's College, Ottawa. He enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1945 at age 16 where he was a member of the UBC chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, and was among Canada's outstanding track sprinters in the late 1940s. He held the Canadian record for the men's 100-yard dash and qualified for the 1948 London Olympics, but a bad knee kept him from competing. He graduated from UBC with a BA in 1949.Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, Turner went on to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he earned a BA in jurisprudence in 1951, and a BCL in 1952; his BA was promoted to an MA per tradition in 1957. He was on the track and field team at Oxford. One of his teammates was Roger Bannister, who became the first runner to break the four-minute barrier in the mile. At Oxford, Turner was a classmate and friend of future Australian Prime Ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, as well as Jeremy Thorpe, future leader of Britain's Liberal Party. He also pursued doctoral studies at the University of Paris from 1952 to 1953.
Relationship with Princess Margaret
On July 25, 1958, a ball was hosted by Turner's mother and stepfather, in honour of Princess Margaret at HMCS Discovery, the Canadian navy's land station in Vancouver. Turner danced with Princess Margaret, one year his junior, and they sat out talking, refusing requests to return to supper. This was the first time that Turner received significant press attention in Canada. Further meetings between them during Margaret's three week official visit to Canada led to considerable speculation about whether the two would become a serious couple. Contemporary press reports suggested there was some consternation about the reports among British officials, but their Canadian counterparts were more relaxed.A year later, in September 1959, press attention returned when reports circulated that Turner had been a recent guest at Balmoral in August where discussions had taken place concerning marriage between the pair; that he had also paid a secret visit to see her in April and that his parents had commented on their close friendship during their visit to Scotland in August.
According to letters discovered in 2015, written by Margaret to her friend Sharman Douglas and obtained by the Daily Mail, the relationship was more serious than previously thought with the princess writing in one letter, seven years later: "John Turner is here & we meet on Thursday. It will seem so funny as we haven't met since I nearly married him & he's bringing his wife!". Turner told the Daily Mail: "I have never talked about it, and I am not going to start talking about it now". Brenda confirmed a "very definite attraction" between her brother and the princess, but said that Turner was uninterested in royalty and would not have given up Catholicism.
It has been claimed Turner attended Margaret's party at Balmoral Castle in August 1959 where his roommate was Margaret's future husband Antony Armstrong-Jones; however, according to his authorized biography, Armstrong-Jones visited Balmoral for the first time in early October 1959. Turner was the only Canadian unofficial guest at their wedding in May 1960. Turner remained friends with Margaret, he and his wife often meeting the princess in Britain or during official visits to Canada. They attended Margaret's 2002 private funeral and were Canada's official representatives at the memorial service.
Marriage and family
Turner was married on May 11, 1963, to Geills McCrae Kilgour who was then a systems engineer with IBM, and the great niece of Canadian Army doctor John McCrae, the author of what is probably the best-known First World War poem, "In Flanders Fields", and sister of David Kilgour, a long-time Canadian Member of Parliament. The Turners had daughter named Elizabeth and three sons: Michael, David, and Andrew. David died in 2021. The Turner children attended Rockcliffe Park Public School, in Ottawa. All three sons attended Upper Canada College, in Toronto.Early career
Turner practised law, initially with the firm of Stikeman Elliott in Montreal, Quebec. He was elected as Member of Parliament for St. Lawrence—St. George in 1962 and was reelected there in every election until the riding's dissolution in 1968. He was the Member of Parliament for Ottawa—Carleton from 1968 to 1976.In 1965, while vacationing in Barbados, Turner noticed that former prime minister and Leader of the Opposition John Diefenbaker, staying at the same hotel, was struggling in the strong surf and undertow. Turner, a competitive swimmer while in university, jumped in and pulled Diefenbaker to shore.
Cabinet minister
Turner was generally respected for his work as a cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s, under prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.Premiership of Lester Pearson
Turner served in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson in various capacities, most notably as Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. When Pearson retired, Turner ran to succeed him at the 1968 leadership convention. Turner, at age 38 the youngest of the dozen leadership candidates, stated "My time is now", and remarked during his speech that he was "not here for some vague, future convention in, say, 1984". Turner stayed on until the fourth and final ballot, finishing third behind Pierre Trudeau and runner-up Robert Winters.Premiership of Pierre Trudeau
Turner served in Trudeau's cabinet as minister of justice for four years. Biographer Paul Litt argues that Turner was a hard-working, well-informed minister whose success was assured by his warm relationship with his peers. His achievements, say Litt, included strengthening the rights of individual defendants on trial, greater efficiency in the justice system, creation of the influential Law Reform Commission, selecting highly professional judges, and bringing a policy perspective to the Justice Department. He led the government's position in the highly controversial Official Languages Act, and he took control during the October Crisis in 1970.A member of the Business Liberal faction of the Liberal Party, Turner then served as Minister of Finance from 1972 until 1975. His challenges were severe in the face of global financial issues such as the 1973 oil crisis, the collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods trading system, slowing economic growth combined with soaring inflation, and growing deficits. His positions were more conservative than Trudeau's and they drew apart. In 1975 Turner surprisingly resigned from cabinet. The Liberals had won the 1974 election by attacking Robert Stanfield's Progressive Conservatives over their platform involving wage and price controls. However, Trudeau decided to implement the wage and price controls in late 1975. In a 2013 interview with Catherine Clark on CPAC, Turner confirmed his resignation from cabinet was a direct result of refusing to implement wage and price controls, after campaigning against them in 1974.
In his memoirs, Trudeau wrote that Turner said he resigned as Finance Minister in 1975 because he was tired of politics, after 13 years in Ottawa, and wanted to move on to a better-paying job as a lawyer in Toronto, to better support his family and to be with them more, as his children were growing up. Trudeau also suggested that Turner's years as finance minister were very difficult because of turbulent and unusual conditions in the world economy, characterized as stagflation, largely caused by enormous increases in the price of oil.