John Turner

John Napier Wyndham Turner (born June 7, 1929) is a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 17th Prime Minister of Canada, in office from June 30 to September 17, 1984.

In his political career, Turner held several prominent Cabinet posts, including minister of justice and minister of finance, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from 1968 to 1975. Amid a global recession and the prospect of having to implement the unpopular wage and price controls, Turner surprisingly resigned his position in 1975. After a hiatus from politics from 1975 to 1984, Turner returned and successfully contested the Liberal leadership. Turner held the office of prime minister for 79 days (the second shortest tenure in Canadian history after Sir Charles Tupper), as he advised the Governor General to dissolve parliament immediately after being sworn in as prime minister, and went on to lose the 1984 election in a landslide. Turner stayed on as Liberal leader and headed the Official Opposition for the next six years, leading his party to a modest recovery in the 1988 campaign; he resigned as Liberal leader in 1990 and stepped down as an MP at the 1993 election. Turner was Canada's first prime minister born in the United Kingdom since Mackenzie Bowell in 1896. At age 95, Turner is currently the oldest living former Canadian Prime Minister.

Early life
Turner was born on June 7, 1929, in Richmond, London, England, to Leonard Hugh Turner, a journalist, and Phyllis Gregory. He had a brother, Michael (who died shortly after birth), born in 1930, and a sister, Brenda. When Turner's father died in 1932, he and his sister moved to Canada with their Canadian-born mother. The family settled in her childhood home in Rossland, British Columbia and later moved to Ottawa, Ontario.

Turner's mother was loving but demanding of her two children. The family was not wealthy. His mother remarried in 1945 to Frank Mackenzie Ross, who later served as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, and the family relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Prime minister (June–September 1984)
Trudeau retired after polls showed the Liberals faced certain defeat in the next election if he remained in office. Turner then re-entered politics, and defeated Jean Chrétien, his successor as finance minister, on the second ballot of the June 1984 Liberal leadership convention. He was formally appointed prime minister on June 30. When he was sworn in, Turner was not an MP or senator. Had he wished to have parliament summoned, he would not have been able to appear on the floor of the House of Commons. He also 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 Vancouver Quadra, British Columbia. This was a sharp departure from usual practice, in which the incumbent in a safe seat resigns to allow a newly elected party leader a chance to get into parliament. However, this was part of Turner's strategy to rebuild the Liberals' image in western Canada; at the time, the party held no seats west of Winnipeg.

In his final days of office, Trudeau recommended that Governor General Jeanne Sauvé appoint over 200 Liberals to patronage positions, including senators, judges, and executives on various governmental and crown corporation boards. The large number of appointments, as well as doubtful qualifications of some appointees, generated a severe backlash across the political spectrum. Turner then made a further 70 appointments himself, one of Trudeau's conditions for retiring earlier than he had planned.