With the decision by Prime Minister John N. Turner to send Canadians to the polls, Time Magazine on this date in 1984 published a primer for readers about the election. Their reporter described the major regional challenges both the rookie PM, Turner, and the rookie Opposition leader, Brian Mulroney, faced.
“Turner and (Brian) Mulroney agree that the next Canadian government should be more representative of the country as a whole,” the magazine reported. “Under (Pierre) Trudeau, the Liberals shrank to become the party of eastern Canada: they held only two of 77 parliamentary seats from the four provinces west of Ontario. For their part, the Conservatives have only one of 75 seats in the French-speaking province of Quebec. In parallel attempts to remedy that imbalance, Ontario-raised Turner is expected to run for Parliament from British Columbia, while Mulroney is expected to trade his safe seat in Nova Scotia for a constituency in his native Quebec.”
In the end, both Turner and Mulroney were personally successful in securing their seats while the Tories won the largest mandate in Canadian history, winning 211 seats when the polls closed on September 4.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.