‘There’s so much attention on me’: Fathers’ legacies loom large for children of Canadian prime ministers

After testing earwax harvested from the garbage can of a distant Diefenbaker relative, last month Toronto legal assistant George Dryden announced that he had obtained conclusive DNA proof that he is the only biological child of John Diefenbaker.

The discovery, if true, makes Mr. Dryden the latest inductee into the ranks of prime ministerial offspring. It is a prestigious group: If Mr. Dryden is anything like the children of Diefenbaker’s successors, he has a 9% chance of becoming a TV host, a 13% chance of running a major shipping company and a 4% chance of getting elected to public office.

Naturally, Mr. Dryden said last month, he will change his name to George Diefenbaker.

About 20 Canadians can call themselves the sons or daughters of a Canadian prime minister. They have become philanthropists, diplomats, Oscar-winning actors, heavy-metal guitarists, scuba divers and documentary filmmakers. But of the many who have decided to take up a life in politics, not one has come close to escaping the shadow of their famous father. The legacy of his deceased father looms heavily over Justin Trudeau as he runs for the Liberal leadership – but of course, it always has.

Geoffrey Pearson was the Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union during the years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During Pierre Trudeau’s mid-1980s “peace initiative,” Mr. Pearson was the prime minister’s right-hand man as he travelled the world seeking to defuse Cold War tensions.

Yet, when Mr. Pearson died in his sleep four years ago, newspapers reported that Lester Pearson’s son had died.

The media glare never really subsides, says Catherine Clark, daughter of Joe Clark and Maureen McTeer.

The birth of children needs to be announced by press release. Weddings become star-studded political affairs thronged with camera crews. “We had to have a police presence at our wedding because of the publicity,” said Ms. Clark, who married 22 years after her father left office.

Criminal charges, when they occur, become national news. When Jean Chrétien’s adopted son Michel was charged — and later acquitted — of sexual assault in 2002, it made headlines as far away as the U.K.

Partially to evade the media spotlight, prime ministerial offspring have occasionally taken to going west. At the age of 23, William Tupper, son of Charles Tupper, moved to Manitoba, where he eventually made his way to provincial politics. Fresh out of McGill, Justin Trudeau moved to Vancouver to study at UBC and later take up a pair of high school teaching positions.

Still, even as he settled in Trudeau-hating British Columbia, Liberals — and public polls — clamoured for the handsome son to become a Liberal party saviour. Three national electoral defeats have only made the calls louder.

“There’s so much attention on me … for God knows what reason,” said Mr. Trudeau in 2007.

Of course, the pressure is off if your political forebear was not particularly popular. Arthur Meighen served fewer than 21 months as prime minister, yet led his party to two electoral defeats – and both times suffered the rare distinction of losing his own seat. An attempted comeback in 1941 fared no better.

Thirty years later, when his grandson, Michael, ran for MP in the Montreal riding of Westmount, “there wasn’t a heck of a lot of attention paid to the fact that I was Arthur Meighen’s grandson,” said Mr. Meighen, now a former senator, speaking from his Toronto law office.

His last name, instead of having political cachet, simply confused reporters and well-wishers. “The name Meighen, it’s bad enough in English, you get ‘Meegan’ and ‘Moogan’ and ‘Mygan’,” said Mr. Meighen. (It is pronounced ‘mee-han’.)

Although he never played on the carpeted floors of 24 Sussex, Paul Martin came close to being raised by a prime minister. His father, Paul Martin Sr., was a Liberal member of parliament for 33 years — and even earned the prime ministerial title the “Right Honourable” — yet his three decades worth of leadership bids were soundly defeated.

“I think [Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau] were good prime ministers but I would have been a great one,” the elder Martin told CBC’s Front Page Challenge in 1988, four years before his death.

The younger Martin had gone west to make it on his own, spending his 20s working in the Alberta oil fields and on High North construction sites. By the 1970s and 1980s, he was expanding Canadian Steamship Lines and transforming himself into a multi-millionaire. (He still stands as one of the wealthiestex-leaders of a democratic nation.)

On the sidelines, political life beckoned. In 1988, when Mr. Martin narrowly won the Liberal nomination in the Montreal riding of LaSalle-Émard, pundits speculated that “Paul Martin Jr.” was just the “saviour” to resurrect the Liberals from their spectacular defeat by Brian Mulroney.

“Some will say that I am running because it’s in the blood — it’s in the genes,” he said during a victory speech, attempting to allay suspicions that the cabinet minister’s son saw himself as pre-ordained for political life.

Mr. Martin’s own sons have stayed in the private sector, running Canadian Steamship Lines and partnering with their father on his Martin Aboriginal Initiative. In 2008, sons David and Paul Jr. even appeared with their father at a pair of Alberta galas feting CSL as a “successful Canadian business family story.”

Nevertheless, it is inevitable the young, handsome Martin boys are asked about their political aspirations.

Catherine Clark hears it often. “When people ask me if I plan to run I say ‘I will never say never,’ because I feel that’s the safest and most appropriate answer to give,” she said.

Historians often omit the fact that when Sir John A. Macdonald dispatched trainloads of militiamen to crush Louis Riel’s Northwest Rebellion in 1885, his only son was among them. For Hugh John Macdonald, the expedition was his own act of rebellion.

Sir John had a lifelong skepticism of military life, according to Macdonald biographer Richard Gwyn, which may be why his son had made sure to serve in every major military engagement since the Fenian Raids.

By 1891, however, an aging Sir John A. persuaded Hugh to run as the Tory candidate for Winnipeg in the 1891 election. Hugh hoped for defeat, he confessed later, but Winnipeg voters nevertheless sent him to Ottawa. Disgusted by Ottawa, which he called “like a city of the Dead,” Hugh resigned less than three years into his term.

Still, the calls from political organizers kept coming. In 1897, the Manitoba Conservatives adopted the famous son as their leader, and the frontier province soon elected him as their eighth premier. Notably, the son of Canada’s most famous binge-drinker quickly used his newfound power to usher in temperance legislation. However, he was only in the premier’s chair a few months before the federal Tories urged him to resign and become a star candidate for the 1900 election.

Just as Justin Trudeau’s run for Liberal leadership would ignite calls of Trudeaumania 2.0, the reappearance of Hugh “into the arena of Dominion politics” also kindled “increased interest” in the election, as The New York Times staidly noted at the time. But even a Macdonald could not defeat his wildly popular opponent, Clifford Sifton.

As the Manitoba Historical Society put it in a 1973 biography, Hugh “bore the burden of heredity throughout his life, and never could escape being ‘the old man’s son.’”

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