John Napier Wyndham Turner was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 17th prime minister of Canada from June to September 1984.
68 Facts About John Turner
2.
John Turner served as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and leader of the Official Opposition from 1984 to 1990.
3.
John Turner served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as minister of justice and attorney general from 1968 to 1972, and minister of finance from 1972 to 1975.
4.
Amid a global recession and the prospect of having to implement unpopular wage and price controls, John Turner resigned from his position in 1975.
5.
From 1975 to 1984, John Turner took a hiatus from politics, working as a corporate lawyer on Bay Street.
6.
John Turner held the office of prime minister for just 79 days, as he advised the governor general to dissolve Parliament immediately after being sworn in.
7.
John Turner 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.
8.
John Turner stayed on as Liberal leader and led the Opposition for the next six years.
9.
John Turner resigned as party leader in 1990 and did not seek re-election in 1993.
10.
John 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.
11.
John Turner was born on June 7,1929, in Richmond, Surrey, England, to Leonard Hugh John Turner, an English journalist, and Phyllis Gregory, a Canadian economist.
12.
John Turner had a brother, Michael, born in 1930, and a sister, Brenda, born in 1931.
13.
When John Turner's father died in 1932, he and his sister moved to Canada with their Canadian-born mother.
14.
John Turner's mother was loving but demanding of her two children.
15.
John Turner's mother remarried in 1945 to Frank Mackenzie Ross, who later served as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, and the family relocated to Vancouver.
16.
John Turner was educated at Ashbury College and St Patrick's College, Ottawa.
17.
John Turner 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.
18.
John Turner 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.
19.
John Turner graduated from UBC with a BA in 1949.
20.
John Turner was on the track and field team at Oxford.
21.
At Oxford, John 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.
22.
John Turner pursued doctoral studies at the University of Paris from 1952 to 1953.
23.
John Turner danced with Princess Margaret, one year his junior, and they sat out talking, refusing requests to return to supper.
24.
John Turner was quoted as saying, "I have nothing whatsoever to say about these reports".
25.
John Turner told the Daily Mail: "I have never talked about it, and I am not going to start talking about it now".
26.
Brenda confirmed a "very definite attraction" between her brother and the princess, but said that John Turner was uninterested in royalty and would not have given up Catholicism.
27.
John Turner was the only Canadian unofficial guest at their wedding in May 1960.
28.
John Turner remained friends with Margaret, he and his wife often meeting the princess in Britain or during official visits to Canada.
29.
The John Turner children attended Rockcliffe Park Public School, in Ottawa.
30.
John Turner practised law, initially with the firm of Stikeman Elliott in Montreal, Quebec.
31.
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.
32.
John Turner was generally respected for his work as a cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s, under prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.
33.
John Turner served in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson in various capacities, most notably as Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs.
34.
When Pearson retired, John Turner ran to succeed him at the 1968 leadership convention.
35.
John Turner stayed on until the fourth and final ballot, finishing third behind Pierre Trudeau and runner-up Robert Winters.
36.
John Turner served in Trudeau's cabinet as minister of justice for four years.
37.
Biographer Paul Litt argues that John Turner was a hard-working, well-informed minister whose success was assured by his warm relationship with his peers.
38.
John Turner led the government's position in the highly controversial Official Languages Act, and he took control during the October Crisis in 1970.
39.
John Turner's 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.
40.
John Turner's positions were more conservative than Trudeau's and they drew apart.
41.
However, Trudeau decided to implement the wage and price controls in late 1975, so some have suggested that John Turner quit rather than carry out that proposal.
42.
From 1975 to 1984, John Turner worked as a corporate lawyer at the Bay Street law firm McMillan Binch.
43.
When Pierre Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader in 1979 following an election loss, John Turner announced that he would not be a candidate for the Liberal leadership.
44.
John Turner then re-entered politics, and defeated Jean Chretien, his successor as finance minister, on the second ballot of the June 1984 Liberal leadership convention.
45.
When he was sworn in, John Turner was not an MP or senator.
46.
John Turner announced that he would not run in a by-election to get into the Commons, but would instead run in the next general election as the Liberal candidate in the British Columbia riding of Vancouver Quadra.
47.
John Turner then made a further 70 appointments himself, one of Trudeau's conditions for retiring earlier than he had planned.
48.
John Turner was persuaded by internal polls that showed the Liberals were ahead of the Tories; after John Turner won the leadership his party surged in the polls to take a lead, after trailing by more than 20 percentage points before he was selected.
49.
John Turner's policies contrasted with Trudeau's and seemed to legitimize the Tory calls for lowering the deficit, improving relations with the United States, cutting the bureaucracy, and promoting more federal-provincial harmony.
50.
John Turner spoke of creating "make work projects", a discarded phrase from the 1970s that had been replaced by the less patronizing "job creation programs".
51.
Many observers believed that Mulroney clinched the election at this point, as it made John Turner look weak and indecisive.
52.
John Turner discovered late in the campaign that the Liberals' electoral hopes were poor in their traditional stronghold of Quebec.
53.
John Turner had surrounded himself with Trudeau's factional opponents and Trudeau himself did not endorse John Turner.
54.
The election having been called just over a week after his being sworn in, John Turner held the office of prime minister for two months and seventeen days, the second-shortest stint in Canadian history, ahead of only Sir Charles Tupper, who took office after dissolution of parliament.
55.
In 1984, John Turner managed to defeat the Tory incumbent in Vancouver Quadra, Bill Clarke by 3,200 votes, a surprising result given the size of the Tory wave, and became leader of the opposition.
56.
John Turner was the only Liberal MP from British Columbia, and one of only two from west of Ontario.
57.
The Liberals, amid their worst showing in party history and led by an unpopular John Turner, were said by some pundits to be following the British Liberals into oblivion.
58.
John Turner's leadership was frequently questioned, and in the lead up to the 1986 Liberal convention, a vote of confidence loomed large.
59.
John Turner asked the Liberal Senators to hold off on passing the legislation to implement the agreement until an election was held.
60.
John Turner campaigned rallying support against the proposed FTA, an agreement that he said would lead to the abandonment of Canada's political sovereignty to the United States.
61.
John Turner resigned as Official Opposition leader, while still holding the Liberal leadership, so Herb Gray became the caucus leader in the interim.
62.
John Turner continued to represent Vancouver Quadra in the House of Commons before retiring from politics in the 1993 election.
63.
John Turner voiced his support for the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.
64.
John Turner died on September 19,2020, at the age of 91.
65.
John Turner was buried in a private service at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
66.
John Turner was ranked 18th out of the first 20 Prime Ministers of Canada by a survey of Canadian historians in 1999.
67.
John Turner was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada on October 19,1994, and was invested on May 3,1995.
68.
John Turner became Canada's seventeenth Prime Minister, crowning a distinguished parliamentary career during which he held several key Cabinet portfolios.