John Turner
Canadian politician who served under Pierre Trudeau before becoming prime minister himself
JOHN TURNER, who has died aged 91, was a Canadian prime minister with a dazzling array of natural advantages. Tall, handsome and charming, he was a fine athlete and an efficient minister of the Crown while enjoying an acquaintance that ranged across Canada and included members of the Royal Family.
But the gods inflicted on him a nemesis in form of the mercurial French Canadian, Pierre Trudeau, whom he served as a cabinet minister for six years before resigning in exasperation in 1975.
After working as a corporation lawyer in Toronto for a further nine years, Turner finally achieved the prime ministership on Trudeau’s departure in 1984. But nine days after being sworn in, he called an election which swept him from power, largely as an antidote to the “Trudeaumania” which had gripped the nation in the 1960s.
Nobody denied that Turner had made serious errors, not least in outraging the emerging feminist lobby by patting two female party workers’ bottoms. Yet he retained his party’s loyalty in parliament and, during a largely lacklustre second campaign four years later, seemed to take off for a brief period when he denounced the Conservative government for betraying Canadian independence by proposing to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement with the US.
John Napier Wyndham Turner was born on June 7 1929 at Richmond, which was then in Surrey, and was taken to Canada aged three by his Canadian mother, Phyllis, née Gregory, an economist, after the death of his father Hugh, a journalist who wrote for Punch.
As a Catholic he went to St Patrick’s College in Ottawa, when his mother became the only senior woman in the wartime prices and trade board before marrying a Scots-born businessman, Frank Ross, who became lieutenantgovernor of British Columbia.
The boy made his mark at the University of British Columbia as a sprinter, breaking the Canadian 100 yards record and qualifying for the 1948 Olympics, though a bad knee caused by a car crash prevented him from competing.
He then went as a Rhodes scholar to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a friend of the future Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, read Law, and earned a Blue. He studied French civil law at the Sorbonne, was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn and narrowly missed a place in the Canadian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics before returning home.
When a Montreal law firm offered him a job there was a problem in his lack of a Canadian law degree. But a private member’s Bill was passed by legislative assembly to enable him to practise at the province’s Bar; afterwards the premier, Maurice Duplessis, invited him to lunch.
Turner’s image as Canada’s golden boy was further enhanced when his mother summoned him to a party in British Columbia with a special guest. Princess Margaret was immediately attracted; they danced together almost the entire night; later she invited him to another party in Ottawa.
The press smelt romance in the air. When it later found him in Scotland, he claimed not to have met the princess until a member of the Queen Mother’s staff confirmed there had been several meetings. A marriage was impossible since Margaret would have had to renounce her position to marry a Catholic. But Turner remained a discreet friend during the princess’s unhappy later years.
Back in Montreal his cautiously conventional progressive outlook enabled him to win a Liberal seat in the 1962 federal election. The following year he was made a PPS by the new prime minister Lester Pearson, who had known him as a boy.
Moving on to junior ministerial posts, he married one of his campaign workers, Geills Kilgour, and attracted more attention by rescuing a swimmer in difficulties off Barbados – who turned out to be the Tory opposition leader and former prime minister John Diefenbaker.
When Pearson retired in 1968 Turner announced that his time was “now”, “not some vague, future convention in say, 1984”. But the Swinging Sixties hungered for an exotic icon, and it was Trudeau who caught the popular mood. On assuming the leadership he called an immediate election which carried the Liberals to a solid majority.
Turner was given the justice ministry, where he introduced the Official Languages Act, establishing the use of both French and English in federal courts, and rewrote the rules for bail. When Trudeau introduced wartime legislation to deal with the terrorist kidnappings of 1970 Turner insisted that it be limited to only six months.
After becoming finance minister two years later, he became concerned about rising inflation as chairman of the IMF’S policy board. But Trudeau’s lack of interest in economics and refusal to sanction any effective policy eventually drove Turner to resign in 1975. No attempt was made to dissuade him; perhaps he would like to become a judge or a senator, Trudeau suggested.
When the Liberals lost the 1979 election and Trudeau declared that he was going, Turner announced he would not seek the job. The minority Tory government soon fell, and Trudeau returned as prime minister until 1984, when he finally stepped down.
Turner beat Jean Chretien in the ensuing leadership election, but Trudeau had left a snare for him: having made 200 patronage appointments of his own, he demanded that Turner make 19 more, saying that if this was not done he would make them himself as a former prime minister.
Reluctantly Turner agreed, saying he had no option, leading to the devastating reply from Brian Mulroney, leader of the opposition: “You had an option, sir, to say ‘no’, and you said ‘yes’ to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal party”.
As the national backlash against the appointments raged, Turner dissolved parliament, and in the ensuing election Mulroney won a landslide victory.
Although Turner’s was shortest prime ministership in Canadian history after Sir Charles Tupper, Bt, who had sought dissolution of Parliament the day he took office in 1895, he won his party’s only seat in British Columbia, and had no difficulty in overcoming half-hearted attempts to oust him before he made his second bid for power in 1988, when he reduced the Tory majority but remained in opposition. He resigned in 1990.
In retirement John Turner – who remained in parliament until 1993 – was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, and continued to attract the admiration young admirers. He liked to ponder Trudeau’s hold on the popular imagination over a glass of Chivas Regal scotch, travelled by the Toronto subway and enjoyed canoeing deep in the bush.
He kept up with old friends from Oxford, and shot with the Duke of Edinburgh in Scotland.
After writing to the Queen Mother on her 100th birthday, he received a letter of thanks, saying that he still made the best martinis in the world. When she died he was amused to find himself placed between Sir Edward Heath and Lady Thatcher at her funeral in Westminster Abbey
John Turner married Geills Kilgour in 1963; she survives him with a daughter and three sons.
John Turner, born June 7 1929, died September 19 2020