Prime minister of Canada in the context of "Baie-Comeau"

Martin Brian Mulroney (March 20, 1939 – February 29, 2024) was a Canadian lawyer, businessman, and politician who served as the 18th prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993 as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Born in the eastern Quebec city of Baie-Comeau, Mulroney studied political science and law. He then moved to Montreal and gained prominence as a labour lawyer. He ran for leader of the Progressive Conservative party in 1976, placing third. In 1977, he was appointed as president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada. He held that post until 1983, when he became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. Mulroney led the party to a landslide victory in the 1984 federal election, winning the second-largest percentage of seats in Canadian history (at 74.8%) and receiving over 50% of the popular vote. He and his party won a second majority government in 1988.

Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau (October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000) was a Canadian politician and lawyer who served as the 15th prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. Between his non-consecutive terms as prime minister, he served as the leader of the Official Opposition from 1979 to 1980.

Trudeau was born and raised in Outremont, Quebec, and studied politics and law. In the 1950s, he rose to prominence as a labour activist in Quebec politics by opposing the conservative Union Nationale government. Trudeau was then an associate professor of law at the Université de Montréal. He was originally part of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), but then joined the Liberal Party in 1965, believing that the NDP could not achieve power. That year, he was elected to the House of Commons, and was quickly appointed as prime minister Lester B. Pearson's parliamentary secretary. In 1967, Trudeau was appointed as minister of justice and attorney general, during which time he liberalized divorce and abortion laws and decriminalized homosexuality. Trudeau's outgoing personality and charisma caused a sensation, termed "Trudeaumania", which helped him win the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1968. He then succeeded Pearson and became prime minister of Canada.

In Canada, a lieutenant governor (/lɛfˈtɛnənt/; French [masculine]: lieutenant-gouverneur, or [feminine]: lieutenante-gouverneure) is the representative of the King of Canada in the government of each province. The governor general of Canada appoints the lieutenant governors on the advice of the prime minister of Canada to carry out most of the monarch's constitutional and ceremonial duties for an unfixed period of time—known as serving "His Excellency's pleasure" — though five years is the normal convention. Similar positions in Canada's three territories are termed "commissioners" and are representatives of the federal government, not the monarch directly.

The offices have their roots in the 16th and 17th century colonial governors of New France and British North America, though the present incarnations of the positions emerged with Canadian Confederation and the British North America Act in 1867, which defined the viceregal offices as the "Lieutenant Governor of the Province acting by and with the Advice the Executive Council thereof." The posts still ultimately represented the government of Canada (that is, the Governor-General-in-Council) until the ruling in 1882 of the Lord Watson of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the case of Maritime Bank v. Receiver-General of New Brunswick, whereafter the lieutenant governors were recognized as the direct representatives of the monarch. The Constitution Act, 1982 provides that any constitutional amendment that affects the office of the lieutenant governor requires the unanimous consent of each provincial Legislative Assembly as well as the House of Commons and the Senate.

William Lyon Mackenzie King (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was the prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s. With a total of 21 years and 154 days in office, he remains the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history.

King studied law and political economy in the 1890s and later obtained a PhD, the first Canadian prime minister to have done so. In 1900, he became deputy minister of the Canadian government's new Department of Labour. He entered the House of Commons in 1908 before becoming the first federal minister of labour in 1909 under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. After losing his seat in the 1911 federal election, King worked for the Rockefeller Foundation before briefly working as an industrial consultant. Following the death of Laurier in 1919, King won to the leadership of the Liberal Party. Taking the helm of a party torn apart by the Conscription Crisis of 1917, he unified both the pro-conscription and anti-conscription factions of the party, leading it to victory in the 1921 federal election.

Sir John Alexander Macdonald (10 or 11 January 1815 – 6 June 1891) was the first prime minister of Canada, serving from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 until his death in 1891. He was the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, and had a political career that spanned almost half a century.

Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada (today in eastern Ontario). As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become premier under the colony's unstable political system. In 1864, when no party proved capable of governing for long, he agreed to a proposal from his political rival, George Brown, that the parties unite in a Great Coalition to seek federation and political reform. He was a leading figure in the subsequent discussions and conferences which resulted in the British North America Act and the establishment of Canada as a nation on 1 July 1867.

The King's Privy Council for Canada (French: Conseil privé du Roi pour le Canada), sometimes called His Majesty's Privy Council for Canada or simply the Privy Council (PC), is the full group of personal advisors to the monarch of Canada on state and constitutional affairs. Practically, the tenets of responsible government require the sovereign or his viceroy, the governor general, almost always to follow only that advice tendered by the Cabinet: a committee within the Privy Council composed usually of elected members of Parliament. Those summoned to the Privy Council are appointed for life by the governor general on the advice of the prime minister. The group is composed predominantly of former Cabinet ministers, with some others having been inducted as an honorary gesture. Privy counsellors are accorded the use of an honorific style and post-nominal letters, as well as various signifiers of precedence.

Lester Bowles Pearson (23 April 1897 – 27 December 1972) was a Canadian politician, diplomat, and scholar who served as the 14th prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968. He also served as leader of the Liberal Party from 1958 to 1968 and as leader of the Official Opposition from 1958 to 1963.

Born in Newtonbrook, Ontario (now part of Toronto), Pearson pursued a career in the Department of External Affairs went on to serve as the Canadian ambassador to the United States from 1944 to 1946. He entered politics in 1948 as Secretary of State for External Affairs, serving in that position until 1957 in the governments of William Lyon Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent. Pearson was also the seventh president of the United Nations General Assembly from 1952 to 1953. He was a candidate to become secretary-general of the United Nations in 1953, but was vetoed by the Soviet Union. He later won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Crisis, for which he received worldwide attention. After the Liberal Party was defeated in the 1957 federal election, Pearson handily won the leadership of the party in 1958. He suffered two consecutive defeats by Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker in 1958 and 1962. He successfully challenged Diefenbaker for a third time in the 1963 federal election, winning a minority government. Pearson's Liberals won another minority government in the 1965 federal election.

Stephen Joseph Harper (born April 30, 1959) is a Canadian politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015. He is to date the only prime minister to have come from the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada, being the party's co-founder and serving as its first leader from 2004 to 2015. Since 2018, he has also been the chairman of the International Democracy Union.

Harper studied economics, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1985 and 1991, respectively, from the University of Calgary. He was one of the founders of the Reform Party of Canada and was first elected to Parliament in the 1993 federal election in the riding of Calgary West. He did not seek re-election in 1997, and instead joined and later led the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative lobbyist group. In 2002, he succeeded Stockwell Day as leader of the Canadian Alliance, the successor to the Reform Party, and returned to Parliament as leader of the Official Opposition. In 2003, Harper and Peter MacKay negotiated the merger of the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada to form the Conservative Party of Canada. Harper was elected as the party's first leader in 2004. In the 2004 federal election, the Conservative Party lost to the Liberal Party led by Paul Martin. Following the defeat of Martin's government in a motion of no confidence, Harper led the Conservatives to a minority government in the 2006 federal election.