John Turner

• Born: June 7, 1929
• Birthplace: Richmond, Surrey, England
• Died: September 19, 2020
• Deathplace: Toronto, Ontario

The Liberal Turner was seen as a more moderate and business-friendly successor to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, but his party was swept from power less than three months after he became prime minister, and Conservative Brian Mulroney assumed the ministry.

Long-serving Liberal Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau had announced his retirement from politics in 1979, after his party was defeated at the polls by the Conservative Party. He returned, however, in February 1980, to lead his party in defeating the Conservatives, headed by Prime Minister Joe Clark, and to reassume the ministry. In 1984, though, Trudeau felt ready to retire for good at age sixty-five, so the Liberals had to elect a new leader.

The two main contenders for the post were John Turner, a former finance minister who had spent the last nine years working on Bay Street—the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street—in Toronto, and Jean Chrétien, a working-class Quebecer who ran a more populist campaign. Turner won the support of his party and accordingly became prime minister early in July 1984. Turner was widely seen as being more pragmatic than was the idealistic Trudeau, bringing the atmosphere of the business world into Parliament. One Canadian radio commentator christened Turner’s government “Boys Town on the Rideau.” (The Rideau is the canal that runs through Ottawa, right by Parliament Hill.)

Turner faced fundamental problems, however. The Liberal Party was unpopular, and he had little time to renovate it before the next election. Furthermore, Trudeau had made large-scale patronage appointments before leaving office, and Turner, in turn, made even more such appointments once he assumed power. Turner seemed unable to decide whether to assume Trudeau’s mantle or to jettison it. This perceived vacillation hurt Turner, especially in Quebec, the traditional stronghold of the Liberals. Despite his distinguished appearance, Turner came across as stiff and conventional on the campaign trial. Unusually, Conservative leader Brian Mulroney was himself a Quebecer who spoke French with near fluency, and Mulroney’s party swept Quebec on the way to comprehensively defeating the Liberals. It was all Turner could do to win his own seat in the British Columbia riding of Vancouver Castro.

Despite the Liberal defeat, Turner retained leadership of the party, defeating another challenge by Chrétien in 1986. In the next few years, Liberals assumed the premiership of Ontario, and the Conservatives began to look vulnerable again, as constitutional tension over Quebec’s role in the nation mounted. Mulroney had also alienated many vocal Canadian constituencies through his perceived alignment with the United States, especially his advocacy of a free trade agreement with that nation. Leading the Liberals into the 1988 campaign, Turner swerved sharply from his previous pro-business stance, advocating a platform of economic protectionism that would preserve Canada’s distinct economic and cultural identities. Though Turner won significantly more seats for the Liberals in 1988 than in 1984, however, the Liberals still lost badly, prompting many to assert that Canada had chosen an irreversible path toward absorption into the American economic sphere.

In part because of this loss, Turner stepped down as the leader of the Liberals in 1990 and joined the firm Miller Thomson LLP. Leaving Parliament in 1993 before being named a Companion of the Order of Canada the following year, he continued to work with Miller Thomson until his retirement in 2013. He died at his home in Toronto on September 19, 2020, at the age of ninety-one.

Impact

Turner inherited the leadership of a party in decline, and he was unable to retain his party’s majority in the 1984 elections. His changing tactics in the late 1980s responded to the changing national perception of its proper cultural and economic relationship to the United States, but that issue alone proved insufficient to bring the Liberals back to power.

Bibliography

Austen, Ian. "John Turner, Briefly Its Leader but Long a Force in Canada, Dies at 91." The New York Times, 1 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/world/canada/john-turner-dead.html. Accessed 9 Oct. 2020.

Bothwell, Robert. "John Turner." The Canadian Encyclopedia, 22 Sept. 2020, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/john-turner. Accessed 9 Oct. 2020.

Cahill, Jack. John Turner: The Long Run. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984.

Weston, Greg. Reign of Error: The Inside Story of John Turner’s Troubled Leadership. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1988.