Ranking Canada’s Prime Ministers from Most to Least Boring

Everyone knows Canada is one of the greatest countries in the world. But what about the people who made it great? That’s right: I’m talking about the prime ministers. We have a rich history of illustrious leaders making the good decisions that we like, which are helpful to us in following our dreams. But what do we really know about the 23 white people who have bossed us around for the last 150 years?

The answer: a lot. Several thousand words it turns out—at least. So to save you some time, we here at VICE Canada have compiled a definitive list of the Titans of Confederation in order of most to least boring (by definition, with the exception of Pierre Trudeau, no Canadian politician can be “cool.”)

Behold your prime ministers in ascending order of excitement.

Image via Wikimedia

23. Alexander Mackenzie (1874-1878)

Alexander Mackenzie was a stone-mason by trade, and carried all his life the no-nonsense, straight-shooting attitude of a good, working class 19th-century Protestant. He also looks like the old man from Home Alone.

22. Mackenzie Bowell (1894-1896)

Bowell is one of only two senators to serve as prime minister. He was also the Grand Master of Orange Lodge in Canada, which represents a powerful commitment to hating the Irish. Despite staying on in the Senate until his death 1917, no one from the government showed up at his funeral. Harsh.

Photo via Wikimedia

21. Charles Tupper (1896)

Charles Tupper was prime minister for roughly two months in 1896 before losing an election to Wilfrid Laurier. He was also largely responsible for bringing Nova Scotia into Confederation in 1867 and presumably felt pretty entitled to the job, because he refused to resign after his loss and tried to appoint his own government until the Governor General told him to fuck off. He was also seduced from his staunch Baptist upbringing on a trip to Scotland when he encountered some delicious Scotch whisky and later broke off an eight-year engagement to his teenage sweetheart. I choose to believe these two things are related.

20. Louis St. Laurent (1948-1957)

Nice guy. His relationship with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was frosty at best.

19. Wilfrid Laurier (1896-1911)

Laurier was the first Francophone prime minister, served in Parliament for 45 years, coined the phrase “sunny ways,” and pretty much established Canada as we know it today both geographically and as a more-or-less culturally liberal country. But the only interesting things about him are that he carried on a 20-year emotional affair with some other woman while he was married and that John Diefenbaker sold him a newspaper in 1910.

Photo via Wikimedia

18. Paul Martin (2003-2006)

Paul Martin is best known for his epic rivalry with Jean Chretien and for his brief stint as a steamship mogul. He fulfilled his family dream of someone named Paul Martin becoming the prime minister. He also beat polio, which is much more impressive than anything FDR ever accomplished.

17. Joe Clark (1979-1980)

Joe Clark is literally best known for being forgettable, and also for losing his luggage. Some guy recognized Clark once out on the streets of Montreal in 2007 and then punched him in the face. Joe Clark is the Charlie Brown of Canada.

READ MORE: A Definitive Ranking of US Presidents From Lamest to Coolest

16. John Abbott (1891-1892)

Before entering politics, John Abbott was best known for successfully defending Confederate soldiers from extradition after they were repeatedly captured trying to attack Vermont from across the Canadian border. This pissed off Lincoln so much it almost brought us into the American Civil War on the side of slavery. He is also distantly related by marriage to Dr. Norman Bethune, who fought with Mao in the Chinese Civil War. John Abbott and his family loved civil wars, I guess.

Image via Wikimedia

15. Arthur Meighen (1920-1921; 1926)

Arthur Meighen is a huge nerd who was repeatedly humiliated by Mackenzie King. After losing government to King twice in the 1920s, Meighen tried to stage a comeback to federal politics in the early 1940s, winning the Conservative leadership in 1941 and trying to get a seat in a 1942 by-election. It was convention at the time that the government wouldn’t run anyone against an opposition leader, so King didn’t run a Liberal—but he hated Meighen so much that he poured money into the CCF candidate’s campaign, who trounced Meighen and kept him out of Parliament. Quite possibly the biggest loser in Canadian history.

14. John Turner (1984)

John Turner qualified as a track sprinter for the 1948 Olympic team, almost married Princess Margaret, and rescued John Diefenbaker from drowning in Barbados in 1965. He was also caught on television in 1984 patting women from the Liberal Party executive on the ass. Most noteworthy for being brutally owned during a televised election debate by Brian Mulroney.

13. Robert Borden (1911-1920)

Robert Borden is #13 on this list because he survived Parliament burning down in 1916 by crawling out of the inferno on his hands and knees, and also because he is distantly related to Lizzie.

12. Richard Bedford Bennett (1930-1935)

Imagine if they made the villain from It’s A Wonderful Life the prime minister and you have a rough approximation of R. B. Bennett. His solution to the Great Depression was rounding up single unemployed men in military-run work camps where they did hard labour for less than 20 cents a day. When they kicked up a fuss about this situation, Bennett had the RCMP beat the shit out of them in Regina on Canada Day 1935. Fuck R. B. Bennett.

Brian Mulroney with some American dude. Photo via Wikimedia

11. Brian Mulroney (1984-1993)

Brian Mulroney is basically Patrick Bateman, minus the murders. He was so charming that his law firm kept him on the payroll despite failing the bar exam twice. He also had a noted fondness for receiving cash in brown envelopes from sketchy German businessmen, but hell, who doesn’t?

10. John Thompson (1892-1894)

John Thompson was briefly premier of Nova Scotia for two months in 1882 and was the first Catholic prime minister. He died of a heart attack at 49 in Windsor Castle while visiting Queen Victoria, which is kind of a power move.

Photo via Facebook

9. Justin Trudeau (2015-present)

Justin Trudeau has a cool dad and good hair and enjoys The Tragically Hip and is allergic to shirts. He was blessed by Richard Nixon in 1972, which is a pretty amazing baptism. He beat up Patrick Brazeau on live national television, and he has definitely smoked weed. He was also really nice to me the time I accidentally spilled Diet Pepsi on him in 2006.

8. Stephen Harper (2006-2015)

Stephen Harper is a grand conservative visionary in the tradition of John Diefenbaker. He had none of Dief’s weird charm and all of his alienating coldness. He was also (arguably) one of the least socially-conservative figures to emerge out of the Reform/Alliance, which is impressive for a guy so into Murdoch Mysteriesthat he wrote himself into the show. His family fosters cats and he is such a big hockey nerd that he wrote a book about it while prime minister. He also played in a band with a sex offender and performed a surprise set with Yo Yo Ma in 2009. In retrospect, Stephen Harper’s personal life sounds like a really surreal episode of Arthur.

7. Lester B. “Mike” Pearson (1963-1968)

Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for orchestrating the UN response to the Suez Crisis and inventing the concept of peacekeeping. He was also briefly a pilot in World War One, but he kept crashing planes. His instructor started calling him “Mike” because he thought “Lester” was a name for nerds, and the name stuck because he was right.

6. John A. Macdonald (1967-74; 1878-1891)

John A. Macdonald was a corrupt genocidal drunk who loved railroads. He once powered through a five-hour speech by continuously drinking gin and he is sitting down on the steps in that 1864 group photo of the Fathers of Confederation because he was too hungover to stand. He united British North America via the Canadian Pacific Railway at the same time as he was deliberately starving Indigenous peoples onto reserves. He is your father and you will respect him.

5. Kim Campbell (1993)

Kim Campbell appeared in a “tasteful” nude in 1993 and has the best Twitter out of everyone on this list. Mostly, though: a woman running the government? Way too wild for Canada, man.

Image via Wikimedia

4. John Diefenbaker (1957-1963)

JUST LOOK AT THIS GUY. John Diefenbaker was a fucking maniac and nobody liked him. He spent most of his life losing elections at every possible level of government. But he never gave up and eventually, somehow, he became the prime minister and won the largest majority government in Canadian history in 1958. He gave Indigenous peoples the right to vote in 1960 and managed to keep apartheid South Africa out of the Commonwealth, but he was a bitter weirdo who wound up alienating everybody in politics. He was so bitter that when Lester Pearson died in 1972, his only comment was “he shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.” ICE COLD. He also (probably) fathered at least two Diefenbabies out of wedlock, because Dief the Chief is unstoppable.

3. Pierre Trudeau (1968-1979; 1980-1984)

Pierre Trudeau aggressively did not give a fuck. He was friends with Fidel Castro and endorsed by John Lennon as “a beautiful person.” He dated Barbara Streisand in 1969. He was a black belt in judo, stared down rioting Quebec separatists, and regularly flipped people the bird. He was cool to the point that it pissed people off, and you can still use his name to start bar fights in Alberta. Famously, he invented modern Canada in 1982.

2. Jean Chretien (1993-2003)

Jean Chretien’s favourite hobby growing up was beating the shit out of people. Clobbering dudes was his one true passion in life. He started a frenzied melee on the floor of the 1986 Liberal convention and they had to call the cops. He was out for a walk in 1996 and just straight-up choked a guy. He was also fond of figuratively destroying people, like the time he gutted federal government services in 1995, or “everything that happened to Paul Martin after 2003.” Chretien turned the Liberal Party of Canada from a vehicle for Trudeau’s lofty liberalism into the ruthless killing machine it is today. The guy just loves to fight. I probably have to go into protection now.

Image via Wikimedia

1. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1921-1926; 1926-1930; 1935-1948)

Mackenzie King is arguably Canada’s most successful prime minister, but he was inarguably an extremely fucked-up person. He is the only prime minister to have a PhD, which he got for writing a dissertation on “Oriental Immigration in Canada,” where he argued “that Canada should remain a white man’s country… [is] highly necessary on political grounds.” He would later go on to round up Japanese-Canadians in internment camps during the Second World War.

He was also really, really, really into the occult. He regularly held seances with paid mediums, chatting with the ghosts of Leonardo da Vinci, Wilfrid Laurier, his mother, his grandfather, FDR, and several of his dead dogs (one of which he believed to be an incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ). He would lie awake at night in the 1930s obsessing that he was put on earth to help Adolf Hitler turn away from evil and redeem the German people. He never married, (allegedly) had regular sex with prostitutes, and may or may not have been in love with Governor General John Buchan. Minus the racism, Mackenzie King is an inspiration to lonely weirdos everywhere: you can do anything you set your mind to, as long as you ask ghosts about it first.

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