It might have been the worst time in John Turner’s life. Pierre Trudeau, Lazarus-like, had returned and brought the Liberals back into power — and with a majority government, no less. The next few years would be dominated by internecine leadership battles within the Progressive Conservative Party among supporters of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney. For Trudeau, it was an opportunity to achieve the one major mission that had eluded him so far: repatriating the Constitution with an accompanying Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Turner, meanwhile, kept a low profile, putting his head down to build a successful, lucrative life for his family and himself.
Meanwhile, throughout the early 1980s, Turner’s friend Richard Alway, the warden at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, had put together frequent events with special guests designed to keep Turner connected to the Canadian political scene. Alway was a huge Turner fan and consistently tried to get his friend to commit to making a political comeback. Turner refused.
“But he never shut us down either,” Alway now points out. “He never said stop organizing those meetings.”
Even after Mulroney’s convention victory, when the Liberals were at 20 per cent in the polls, Trudeau gave no indication he was about to leave, and Turner kept reminding Alway of that. Nevertheless, Alway continued organizing his lunches, one with Lester Pearson’s respected nationalist Finance Minister Walter Gordon, another with Trudeau backroom adviser Keith Davey. While Alway didn’t expect to get a future endorsement out of either man (Gordon thought Turner far too right-wing), he thought he’d at least neutralized both men as opponents.
“A group of us told John, ‘You should be preparing,’ but he declined,” Alway says.
“He’s not gonna leave,” Turner would retort. He told Gotlieb the same thing in April. “Turner and I talked of his plans,” Gotlieb wrote in his diary. “He was cautious and noncommittal. I know he wants to succeed Trudeau, but he is deeply skeptical about the likelihood of Trudeau stepping down soon.”
Nevertheless, a group of Turner-for-Leader supporters met regularly at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. They believed their guy was the obvious choice to replace Trudeau, but they needed to persuade Turner of that. They wanted to commission a poll proving their hunch but were paranoid about anything leaking out to Trudeau. That meant not using the Liberals’ own pollster, Martin Goldfarb, so Alway flew to Washington to discuss the issue with renowned Gallup pollster Peter Hart. Remarkably, it was long-time Tory supporter and future Ontario lieutenant-governor Hal Jackman who funded the trip and the poll. He liked Turner, even though the two were in opposite parties. Essentially, the Turner supporters wanted to know what would happen to Liberal party fortunes if Trudeau left and Turner took over. The poll’s answer: Liberal fortunes would skyrocket.
Turner attended these secret meetings once or twice, but “he never gave us any encouragement,” Alway recalls — even when the group showed him the very favourable poll.
Turner and his McMillan Binch partner Bill Macdonald had a practice of going to Montreal four times a year to check in with clients Charles and Edgar Bronfman, owners of Seagram, the world’s largest producer and distributor of distilled spirits. “The Bronfmans paid us a handsome sum to spend half a day with them,” Macdonald says. The group would meet at Charles’ home, then take in a Montreal Expos baseball game (Charles owned the team).
In the summer of 1983, Turner told Macdonald on the flight to Montreal that he thought the pressure on him to return to politics would soon become more intense.
“John,” Macdonald told him, “the Liberals have been in for a long time. You could lose.”
Thirty-eight years later, Macdonald tells me Turner “may have been more hopeful about his chances than he should have been. He’d stayed away from politics for a long time.”
Agenda segment, September 5, 2022: Calculating the cost to become prime minister
In July 1983, adviser John Swift sent Turner a confidential note urging him to clarify in his own mind whether he ever intended to be a candidate to replace Trudeau. Swift thought it would reflect poorly on Turner if he announced he wasn’t interested in the leadership after Trudeau’s departure, so if he genuinely wasn’t interested in the job, he should say so now.
However, if Turner were interested (as Swift hoped), then steps needed to be taken immediately. First and foremost, the potential candidate needed to understand that, with Trudeau now deep into his mandate, Turner needed to be prepared to contest both a convention and subsequent election. Furthermore, the party was in rough shape. “The dry rot goes to its foundations,” Swift wrote. “Loyalty from the party and support from the public will have to be earned.”
Swift also told Turner he needed to think about where he intended to run and recommended Vancouver Quadra. He urged Turner to go to New York to get some much-needed media training. And he drew up an org chart listing the campaign’s top advisers: Payne, Alway, Torrance Wylie, Bill Lee, and “Mrs. T.”
Shortly thereafter, Energy Minister Jean Chrétien met with Keith Davey at his office. The subject was the Liberal party leadership. Chrétien was already anticipating the day when Trudeau would step aside, and he wanted Davey’s support in what he was sure would be a two-person race with Turner. But Davey left him disappointed. He believed in alternation and thought it was an anglophone’s turn to be leader. Chrétien failed to get the Rainmaker’s endorsement.
In August 1983, Turner had one of the most important conversations he’d ever had with his daughter, Elizabeth, then 19. They were sitting on the screened-in veranda at the family’s cottage at Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario when Turner raised an issue that was preoccupying him.
“I’ve got people giving me calls asking whether I’ll run for the leadership of the party,” he told Elizabeth. “What do you think, Dump?” (Liz’s nickname originally was Pumpkin, but this had somehow morphed into Dump.)
Elizabeth was candid with her father. “As much as you like the practice of law, I think you’re a bit bored,” she said. She saw a man who was missing the kinds of interactions with other people that are unique to politics, and the chance to affect public policy in Canada.
During this discussion, Geills Turner walked in wanting to know what the two were talking about. She wasn’t happy when she found out.
John and Geills Turner in the Ottawa Civic Centre after Turner won the Liberal leadership on June 16, 1984. (CP PHOTO)
“She thought when he left before that would be the end of it,” Elizabeth says. “She doesn’t love the spotlight. She does very well at it. She’s great at engaging with people and talking to people. She’s very smart and understands policy issues and believed in the public-service aspect of it, but it was hard on her. She didn’t love politics.”
Geills Turner had supported her husband’s political life in the 1960s and ’70s, but she wasn’t disappointed when he quit in 1975. She liked their family’s new, post-political life in Toronto.
“To jump back in? Well, she was kind of taken aback,” Elizabeth recalls.
But Turner’s daughter had a different view. “I said, ‘I think you should.' He was good at practising law and enjoyed some aspects of it, but he missed making a difference in policy work. It was a call to public service, and that was important to him.”
Excerpt from Steve Paikin's John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canada's 17th Prime Minister , which will be published in the English language in Canada by Sutherland House Books. Copyright © 2022 by Sutherland House Books. All rights reserved.