Deleted

[Hedley]

Deleted.

[SII]

*Edited*

[niss]

Interesting Bias,

how come none of these people are on your worst list and none of the people on your worst list are on this one?

[iflyforpie]

Yeah, where's PET?, Mackenzie King? Even if you don't agree with their policies you can't argue with either of those two's impact on Canadian politics, longevity, and popularity. I'd take PET over Mulroney any time.

But Drunk Sir John A takes my vote. Without him, we wouldn't have the CPR. Without the CPR, you guys wouldn't have BC and the prairies would be undeveloped wasteland instead of wheat fields, cattle ranches, oil fields, and growing urban sprawl... and that's what makes this country great!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d7arwcI ... re=related

[Expat]

+1

[Siddley Hawker]

Well, I voted for the best PM we never had, Bob Stanfield. He would have been PM too, except for Doug Ball.

[Brewguy]

Why is Kim Campbell not on the list?

[bandaid]

Has Stephen Harper ever been PM with a majority government? There are plenty of people out there that would agree his name should not be on this list.
You have to give him credit for being able to run a minority for as long as he has I guess but a good, popular government would not have this issue.

[beaverbob]

You have to give him credit for being able to run a minority for as long as he has I guess but a good, popular government would not have this issue.

A leader does not have to be good to be popular.
A leader does not have to be popular to be good.

[bandaid]

And that in a nutshell is Canadian politics.

[The Old Fogducker]

Why is Kim Campbell not on the list?

To be unredeemingly crude, she had a great set ... and she admittedly inhaled!

OFD

[Siddley Hawker]

..she had a great set..

You betcha. Had me thinking in nautical terms every time I saw her.

[Adam Oke]

Why isn't Chrétien on the list? I would never vote Liberal, but I kind of liked the guy!



La Canadienne Bad Ass.

[. ._]

I say Tommy Douglas! And when you get the free MRI to detect that tumour, get it fixed up for free and can play with your grand-kids without selling your house, you have this man to thank.



For the sweet hair alone, this dude should have been Prime Minister.

-istp

[The Old Fogducker]

ISTP:

To quote Kevin O'Leary of "Dragon's Den" on the Communist Broadcasting Commune .... "Are you insane?" I got a kick out of you saying "Free" when describing an 18 month wait for an MRI paid for by horrendous deductions from my pay cheques.

Regards from you favourite Running dog lacky of the capitalist exploiter .... engaging in imperialism and hegemony whenever possible

[Expat]

You have to give him credit for being able to run a minority for as long as he has I guess but a good, popular government would not have this issue.

A leader does not have to be good to be popular.
A leader does not have to be popular to be good.

Yeah...
Arnie is a good exemple. Under his watch, one of the richest places on earth went bankrupt...
Very popular man indeed,

[bizjets101]

Has Stephen Harper ever been PM with a majority government?

That can't possibly be a real question?? Harper will Never have a majority Government.

[bandaid]

Has Stephen Harper ever been PM with a majority government?

That can't possibly be a real question?? Harper will Never have a majority Government.

That question was posed to make people think a little. It was really more a statement than a question.

[Hedley]

make people think a little

Regardless of what party is in power, and who is PM, I really don't like the de facto dictatorship that results when ANYONE gets a majority government, for two reasons:

1) members of the majority party CANNOT vote against the government in Canada, unlike in the USA. If you're an MP and you don't vote with your majority government, you are gone. This is NOT democracy. The MP is NOT representing the views of his constituents.

2) we have no effective system of checks and balances in Canada. We have Parliament, which is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. The Senate is a joke which is periodicallly refilled by loyal party members by whatever PM happens to be in power at the time. And that's pretty well it. No separately-elected executive branch of government. In fact, citizens of Canada have NO SAY in who their PM is. The PM is elected internally by whatever party is in power. This is NOT democracy.

I know I am frequently attacked for holding this view, but I think that Stephen Harper as a minority PM is the best federal government Canada has had in a very, very long time.

Paul Martin, Kim Campell, Joe Clark and John Turner are PM roadkill - for whatever reason, they weren't given a chance to govern, so they simply cannot be fairly evaluated. I might lump Robert Stanfield in here. He was a victim of Trudeaumania, which was eerily similar to the hype and gushing around Hannah Montana and Obama.

That leaves us with:

Jean Cretien - famously corrupt government - see Quebec Sponsorship Scandal
Brian Mulroney - famously corrupt individual. Took bribes as sitting PM, perjury.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau - charitably, a demented genius that severely damaged Canada.

I doubt anyone here is old enough to remember Mike Pearson, who could be summed up as "Mostly Harmless". An affable hockey fan that is best remembered for our new flag, which I personally thought deserved at best 5th .-up. At least Mike wasn't an obvious, unashamed criminal. In fact, he was a good person with good intentions. One can only wonder what accident of politics allowed such a person to rise so high in politics.

Objectively, who was a better PM: Mike Pearson or Stephen Harper? Interesting question.

FYI: More reading about Mike Pearson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_B._Pearson

who actually was a pilot in WWI, a very hazardous vocation. But he was actually hit by a bus in London while on leave, and was injured enough to be sent home from the war.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, he volunteered for service as a Medical Orderly with the University of Toronto Hospital Unit. In 1915, he undertook overseas service with the Canadian Army Medical Corps as a stretcher bearer with the rank of Private, and had a subsequent commissioning to the rank of Lieutenant. During this period of service he spent two years in Egypt and Greece. In 1917, Pearson transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (as the Royal Canadian Air Force did not exist at that time), where he served as a Flying Officer until being sent home with injuries from two accidents; while training as a pilot at an air training school in Hendon, England, Pearson survived an airplane crash during his first flight. Unfortunately, in 1918, he was hit by a London bus during a citywide blackout and was sent home as an invalid to recuperate, and was then discharged from the service. It was as a pilot that he received the nickname of "Mike", given to him by a flight instructor who felt that "Lester" was too mild a name for an airman. Thereafter, Pearson would use the name "Lester" on official documents and in public life, but was always addressed as "Mike" by friends and family

[Hedley]

PS I have the uneasy feeling people are not familiar with Arthur Meighen. A fine, well-spoken intelligent man of strong ethics, these qualities obviously doomed him to a lack of continued success in politics.

It is somewhat remarkable that he achieved the office PM at all, however briefly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Meighen

For years, he battled and was eventually defeated by an under-handed creep by the name of William Lyon Mackenzie King, PM, who was an undisputed lunatic. As sitting PM of a famously corrupt government, WLM King ruled the country based upon the results of seances held, in discussion with his deceased mother and dead pets. I am not making this up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ly ... enzie_King

Privately, he was highly eccentric with his preference for communing with spirits, including those of Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, his dead mother, and several of his Irish Terrier dogs, all named Pat except one named Bob. He also claimed to commune with the spirit of the late President Roosevelt. He sought personal reassurance from the spirit world, rather than seeking political advice. Indeed, after his death, one of his mediums said that she had not realized that he was a politician. King asked whether his party would win the 1935 election, one of the few times politics came up during his seances. His occult interests were kept secret during his years in office, and only became publicized later

[Hedley]

Any superficial review of recent Canadian political history could easily concluide that being a unprincipled lunatic might not have been a stated requirement to hold high rank in Canadian politics, but it certainly was no hindrance to advancement, and might actually have helped.

Case in point: Paul Hellyer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer

He was Trudeau's Minister of Defence that oversaw the destruction - sorry - "integration" of the Canadian military. This is not surprising, given the obvious contempt that Trudeau had for the military. Trudeau dodged military service in WWII, was a fan of the Nazis, and made no secret of the fact that he thought that anyone that served in the military was an idiot.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/new ... 2719408b23

Indeed, it might well be our collective view of Trudeau is unfocused, even distorted. A newly published biography of Trudeau, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, suggests as much.

Since his death in 2000, Trudeau's legacy as a modern father of Confederation, the philosopher-king who remade Canada into a shiny multicultural mosaic, has been burnished to a high polish. Young Trudeau, authored by Max and Monique Nemni, cuts a scratch on that polish, exposes a dark underside to Trudeau's political legacy long hidden from public view.

The Nemnis' book, a model of scholarly rigour and research, reveals that as a youth and young man in the 1930s and early 1940s, Trudeau was no champion of democracy and individual freedoms. He was instead an ardent Quebec nationalist who, during the worst of the war years, admired fascist dictators, regarded reports of Nazi atrocities as British propaganda, plotted treason against the Canadian state and actively promoted a revolution to establish an independent Quebec solely for Catholic French Canadians.

As the Nemnis put it, Trudeau in his youth "was remarkably different from what we and everyone else had assumed."

For example, while still attending the Jesuit-run school, College Jean de Brebeuf, Trudeau wrote a play that described Jewish merchants in a derogatory fashion. In 1936, at age 17, he wrote in a school text that he was willing to use terrorist tactics against Canadian military facilities. The teenage Trudeau also predicted he would return to Montreal 40 years later -- in 1976, no less -- at the head of an army "to declare the independence of Quebec." (The Parti Quebecois under Rene Levesque won its first election in 1976.)

In 1942, the 23-year-old Trudeau was a member of a "secret" revolutionary organization calling for a "national revolution." "The nation that will be reborn from the revolution" would be Catholic and French. Even in 1944, when reports of Nazi atrocities could no longer be dismissed as propaganda, Trudeau was full of admiration for the writing of the now infamous French anti-Semite Charles Maurras.

Wow. But back to Paul Hellyer, who was ambitious and untroubled by any particular code of political beliefs. When he realized that he could not become PM as a Liberal, no problem, he jumped to the Conservatives and tried to become PM as a Conservative. Simply unbelievable.

What was more unbelievable is that Paul Hellyer was an UFO lunatic. I am not making this up. Trudeau's Minister of Defence and architect of the current Canadian military was a complete nutcase:

In November 2005, he accused U.S. President George W. Bush of plotting an "Intergalactic War". The former defence minister told an audience at the University of Toronto:

"The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning...The Bush Administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

I am not making this up.

Now, tell me again why Stephen Harper is the worst PM Canada has ever had, because he likes to play musical instruments at Christmas parties.

[Darkwing Duck]

How come Diefenbaker is not on the list????

Oh wait, now I remember....

I being a hard core right wingest, would have to vote for Harper. I like the man's style. He is able to keep a minority government together and we have the best economy in the world during this recession. We must be doing something right.

I sort of like Pearson for his flag waving ability. He really got Canada's name on the world stage. But that is about it.

MacDonald, both drunk and sober, also have my vote. He was very institutional for setting the corner stone and building this country.

So I guess each has his own reasons for being the best PM.

Now if you were talking premiers, I have to vote for King Ralph (Klien) Love or hate the man for his actions and decisions, he did what he said he was going to do and stuck by his guns. How many politicians can do that? No BS and damn the torpedos kind of thing. Here's to you Ralph, even if you are now sober....

[Hedley]

How come Diefenbaker is not on the list?

On a Canadian aviation website, Diefenbaker could have solved world famine and invented the cure for cancer and he still would be despised forever for pulling the plug on the Arrow

I being a hard core right wingest

relative to Canada's political spectrum, which would put you somewhere around the center on an international spectrum.

[bmc]

Harper doesn't hold a candle to Berlusconi. He has a long way to go to match him.

[Hedley]

That's not really a fair comparison. Heck, Charlie Sheen couldn't keep up with Berlusconi!