Steve Paikin - John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canadas 17th Prime Minister

STEVE PAIKIN

Sutherland House
416 Moore Ave., Suite 205
Toronto, ON M4G 1C9

Copyright 2022 by Steve Paikin

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First edition, October 2022

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Manufactured in China
Cover designed by Lena Yang

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: John Turner : an intimate biography of Canadas 17th prime minister / Steve Paikin
Names: Paikin, Steve, 1960- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana 20220234469 | ISBN 9781989555835 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Turner, John N. | LCSH: Prime ministersCanadaBiography. | LCGFT: Biographies.
Classification: LCC FC626.T87 P35 2022 | DDC 971.064/6092dc23

ISBN 978-1-989555-83-5
eBook ISBN 978-1-989555-91-0

To my dear friend Arthur Milnes,

Whom I first met at John Turners birthday party,

And who truly loved Canadas 17thPrime Minister.

Thanks for your friendship and legendary stories.

ST. MICHAELS CATHEDRAL BASILICA IN downtown Toronto should have been the perfect place to pay tribute to one of the most significant figures in Canadian political history. Spectacularly beautiful inside and out, the 175-year-old church has capacity for 1,600 souls. Under normal circumstances, even that would have been inadequate to accommodate all the people wanting to gather on October 6, 2020, to pay their respects to the deceased. Of that man, former prime minister John George Diefenbaker once said: He was a person who could walk down the main street of most cities and towns in Canada and meet people he knew by name.

Even John Turner himself (who once famously saved Diefenbaker from drowning) used to break into a big grin thinking about the range of his contacts. The only boast Ive ever made, hed say, is that I know more Canadians by their first names than any other Canadian alive. There is no way to prove him right but few doubted him.

John Napier Turner started September 19, 2020, at breakfast with his wife, Geills. Ninety-one years old and in failing health, he died around noon. His long career in Canadian public life and wide acquaintance called for a massive send-off at St. Michaels. It was not to be.

The world was in its sixth month of one of the worst pandemics ever, formally known as SARS-CoV-2. What that meant on October 6 was that fewer than 180 people would be permitted to gather at the basilica. They arrived at designated times, wearing masks, and sitting far from one another. Hymn singing was forbidden. Many people who wanted to be there could not be accommodated on the slimmed-down invitation list, and many who were invited wouldnt come for fear of catching the virus, including Turners only surviving sibling, Brenda Norris, his Liberal disciple, former federal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy, and his long-time friend, the environmental watchdog Monte Hummel, founder of the World Wildlife Fund, who was supposed to deliver one of the eulogies. Precious few Canadians had yet been vaccinated. Thousands were dying and the elderly, in particular, were terrified to gather indoors.

The impression conveyed by Canadas all-news networks, which covered the funeral live, was that a small portion of Turners friends and family had wanted to be there that day. It was not true by a long shot, and it was not the only indignity the Turner family would suffer after the patriarchs death. Canadas national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, announced in its banner headline: Former Prime Minister John Turner, who was in office for just 11 weeks, dies aged 91.

I thought it was stupid and dishonorable, says former Turner staffer Marc Kealey, speaking for many of the deceaseds fans. They were furious that a lifetime of accomplishment and public service was ignored by the headline in favour of what, in fact, was one of the less important parts of Turners life, his brief time at 24 Sussex.

Seventy-nine days is your whole legacy? Kealey asks incredulously. Not balancing the budget as finance minister? Supporting Meech Lake against his party? The fight of his life, the Free Trade Agreement? His championing of democracy? He was a prophet on all of that.

Bob Rae, Canadas newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations, dropped his diplomatic guard on Twitter, referring to the Globe headline as a cheap shot. John Turner was a man of great achievement and public spirit.

I was so sad he didnt get the send-off he deserved, says John Baird, who despite being a former Conservative cabinet minister both federally and in Ontario, had a long-standing friendship with Turner, and admiration for him. He was a good man I think hes one of the truly great Canadians of his generation.

Politicians, like good dramas, often have three acts to their lives. Theres life before politics, life in politics, and life after politics. For many, the middle period is the central feature of their narrative, and sometimes the whole of their reputation and accomplishments.

The extraordinary thing about John Turner is that three acts arent nearly enough to capture the ebb and flow of fortune, political or otherwise, in his life. His early years in England were tragic with the death of his father and brother, neither of whom he knew. He was lucky to have a mother who somehow overcame those tragedies and put him, her only surviving son, on a path to a life of consequence. He was an Olympic-level athlete, a world traveller, a successful lawyer, and a parliamentarian for the first time at age thirty-three, just eighteen months after John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. The comparisons to JFK in terms of ambition, lifestyle, and handsome appearance would follow Turner for decades.

He was the star in Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeaus star-studded cabinets of the late 1960s and 1970s, carrying both the justice and finance portfolios. He then shocked the country by quitting politics to become a Bay Street rainmaker at the tender age of forty-six. Despite Turners spending nearly a decade on the sidelines, Liberals embraced his return to public life in 1984 when he succeeded Trudeau as party leader and became prime minister. As The Globe reminded us, it didnt last long. He would have the shortest tenure of any Canadian prime minister save for Sir Charles Tupper, whose sixty-eight days in 1896 remain the fewest.

His six years as leader of Her Majestys loyal opposition were punctuated by internecine warfare within the Liberal ranks, disloyalty on a shocking level, and self-inflicted wounds of such significance that when he left politics again in 1990 many of his former colleagues on Bay Street lost his phone number, thinking he was damaged goods. It is odd but accurate to say that becoming the prime minister of Canada did not crack the list of Turners most significant accomplishments. But it is what many, especially in the media, remembered of him. Turner rarely complained about his predicament. He had always known that his return to politics in 1984 could be spectacular or disastrous. It was both. The rejection he experienced wounded him deeply.