Architect of the first prime ministerial scandal

"I walked through the valley of humiliation"

"Fuddle duddle"

It's not my airplane!

"For me, I put it on my plate"

I leaked the budget.

John A. Macdonald, 1867-73, 1878-1891

John A. Macdonald was Canada's first prime minister, and was also the architect of the first Canadian political scandal.

Revelations of the shady dealings between the Conservatives and and the Canadian Pacific Railway led to the Pacific Scandal in 1873. Macdonald's government was forced to resign and lost the election in 1874.

He regained power in 1878, but political troubles continued. Macdonald's handling of the North-West Rebellion in 1885 and the execution of Louis Riel outraged French-Canadians, sparking an antagonism between them and English-Canadians that still continues today. The federal powers envisioned by Macdonald were weakened by legal challenges launched by the provinces. 

In his personal life, Macdonald also had his fair share of troubles. At stressful times, he frequently drank to excess. His first wife, Isabella, was an invalid and died in 1856. Of the two boys born to her, only one survived to adulthood. Macdonald married a second time, to Susan Agnes Bernard in 1867. Their joy over a birth of a daughter in 1869 was mitigated by the fact that she suffered from hydrocephaly, which caused both mental and physical handicaps. 

In March 1891, Macdonald won a forth consecutive electoral victory. He died three months later while still prime minister.

William Lyon MacKenzie King, 1921-1930, 1935-1948

In 1931, the Beauharnois Power Company gave the Liberals $1 million in exchange for the right to dam the Beauharnois River for electricity. When the scandal broke in 1931, the Liberals were no longer in office.

"I walked through the valley of humiliation," Mackenzie King said.

But the scandal wasn't great enough to keep the Liberals out of office. After the Great Depression hit, Canadians soon had much bigger socio-economic problems, and King swept back into office in 1935.

Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 1968-1979, 1980-1984

Pierre Trudeau’s commitment to national unity, and vision for Canada caused controversy throughout his terms as prime minister. He's famous for giving the finger to striking workers, pirouetting behind Queen Elizabeth, and uttering the notorious  "fuddle duddle" phrase to reporters.

Trudeau also has the distinction of being the first Canadian prime minister to ever become divorced while in office. Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of a cabinet minister, was 18 years old when she met Trudeau at a Club Med in Tahiti. Although he was nearly 30 years older, the two dated and were married in 1971. At first, Margaret seemed happy as a first lady. She and Pierre had three sons in the first four years of their marriage, and she helped Pierre in his difficult but ultimately successful 1974 re-election bid.

But the election proved to be too much for her. Margaret checked into a psychiatric hospital to recover from the emotional and mental stress of the campaign. Relations with her husband and children disintegrated from there. An avid photographer, she showed up at a Toronto nightclub to document a performance by the Rolling Stones, and ended up becoming involved romantically with both Mick Jagger and Ron Wood.

The Trudeaus separated in 1977, not long after Margaret adopted an autonomous life in New York, separate from her husband and children. In her new jet-setting life, Margaret supplemented her income from Pierre with occasional photo assignments and a minor role in the movie Kings and Desperate Men--A Hostage Incident.

Brian Mulroney, 1984-1993

Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was the first former prime minister to ever bring a lawsuit against the federal government. Mulroney filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in November 1995 against the Justice Department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

He said he was libeled in a letter sent to Swiss authorities as part of an RCMP investigation. The letter alleged that Mulroney received kickbacks in the 1988 sale of 34 Airbus jets to Air Canada, which at the time was government-run. The $1.8 billion sale of the Airbus A-320 jetliners was the largest purchase in Canadian civil aviation history and came after heated competition between Airbus and the Boeing Co. of Seattle.

The letter, written by an official from the department of justice, said the investigation "involves criminal activity on the part of a former prime minister.''

The government maintained that the letter was a normal investigative tool and was intended to be confidential. But its contents were leaked to The Financial Post, which broke the story.

Within hours of the story's appearance, Mulroney, now a well-paid member of several multinational corporate boards, announced he would sue because the "false and reckless'' allegations damaged his reputation.

Mulroney's critics scoffed at this, noting that repeated scandals in his cabinet damaged his reputation so badly that he left office with an approval rating of 10 percent, an all-time low in Canada. The government settled out of court with Mulroney for $36.5 million.

Jean Chretien, 1993-Present

Prime Minister Jean Chretien has had his share of controversies.

In 1995, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded in disgrace after the beating death of a Somali teenager at the hands of Canadian forces officers.

A few years later, the tainted blood scandal attracted a ton of media attention, yet only slightly bruised the reputations of the politicians involved. The controversy began when the government refused to compensate Canadians infected with Hepatitis C from tainted blood prior to 1986.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, blood services were contracted out by the federal government to a private contractor. Tens of thousands of innocent victims were infected with Hep C and HIV from tainted blood.

Justice Horace Krever, who headed the tainted blood inquiry, did not have access to audio tapes, files and transcripts from 1982 to 1989. Information Commissioner John Grace said Health Canada officials tried to "thwart their release under the Access to Information Act".

More recently, the Prime Minister has been accused of playing a direct role in the pepper-spraying of APEC protesters in 1997. The APEC scandal began when Indonesian former President Suharto was attending the APEC meeting in British Columbia. The RCMP used pepper spray to quash students' demonstration over Suharto's human rights violations. Critics say the Canadian government placed economic dealings ahead of Canadians' right to protest.

Students were arrested for protesting and detained without any charges being laid. Then the students and others complained about the RCMP. The solicitor general responsible for RCMP resigned after he was accused of bias. The Chair of the APEC hearing also resigned over allegations of bias. According to police documents obtained by the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, Chretien played a direct role in the incident.

Perhaps the most famous Chretien quotes involve the APEC scandals. When asked by reporters about his involvement, Chretien responded by saying, "For me, pepper I put it on my plate." Chretien also reportedly said that the students were lucky that they were not beaten by baseball bats.

Doug Small, Former Global News Ottawa Bureau Chief

Small sparked a constitutional crisis that left many wondering whether then Finance Minister Michael Wilson should resign. The RCMP charged Small with a criminal offense.

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