Trudeau’s return to power in February, 1980.
Thompson, John Herd, and Stephen J. Randall.
Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.
A strong history of relations between Canada and
the United States, including during the tenure of
Trudeau.
Steve Hewitt
See also Business and the economy in Canada;
Canada Act of 1982; Canada and the United States;
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Elec-
tions in Canada; Foreign policy of Canada; Inflation
in Canada; Lévesque, René; National Energy Pro-
gram (NEP); Quebec referendum of 1980; Reagan,
Ronald; Soviet Union and North America; Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI); Turner, John; Unemploy-
ment in Canada.
Turner, John
Identification Prime minister of Canada in 1984
Born June 7, 1929; Richmond, Surrey, England
The Liberal Turner was seen as a more moderate and
business-friendly successor to Prime Minister Pierre Tru-
deau, but his party was swept from power less than three
months after he became prime minister, and Conservative
Brian Mulroney assumed the ministr y.
Long-serving Liberal Canadian prime minister Pi-
erre Trudeau had announced his retirement from
politics in 1979, after his party was defeated at the
polls by the Conservative Party. He returned, how-
ever, in February, 1980, to lead his party in defeat-
ing 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 Parlia-
ment. 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. Further-
more, Trudeau had made large-scale patronage ap-
pointments 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 lead-
ership of the party, defeating another challenge by
Chrétien in 1986. In the next few years, Liberals
assumed the premiership of Ontario, and the Con-
servatives began to look vulnerable again, as consti-
tutional tension over Quebec’s role in the nation
mounted. Mulroney had also alienated many vocal
Canadian constituencies through his perceived align-
ment 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, advo-
cating a platform of economic protectionism that
would preserve Canada’s distinct economic and cul-
tural 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.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 1980’s responded to the changing na-
tional perception of its proper cultural and eco-
nomic relationship to the United States, but that is-
sue alone proved insufficient to bring the Liberals
back to power.988 Turner, John The Eighties in America