more prime ministerial trivia

Stephen Harper is currently running for re-election.  He has been elected 
Prime Minister twice before, both times with minority governments, going 
back to 2006.  So he has served as our Prime Minister for just a little 
over 5 years so far -- or slightly longer than the maximum he could have 
served with a single majority government.

Harper is also our 22nd prime minister.  And, as luck should have it, 
those 5 years plus are enough to make him the 10th-longest-serving Prime 
Minister in our history.

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

Mind you, of the 12 prime ministers who served shorter terms than him, 
only 5 were actually elected to the position; the other 7 were all people 
who took over and carried on the previous prime minister's mandate after 
the previous prime minister died or resigned, and who never got re-elected 
after that (in fact, between the elections of 1891 and 1896, there were no 
less than *five* prime ministers who shared a single mandate, three of 
whom were dead before the five-year mandate was over; so 4 of the 7 prime 
ministers I just referred to all date to the 1890s; incidentally, no 
Canadian prime minister has died on the job since then).

On the other hand, no one has ever led minority governments for as long as 
Harper has, *certainly* not consecutively.  Lester Pearson had two 
back-to-back minority governments in the 1960s, and both of Harper's terms 
(the shortest of which was 2 years, 142 days) lasted longer than Pearson's 
terms (the longest of which was 2 years, 135 days).  John Diefenbaker had 
two very short-lived minority governments in the 1950s, but they were 
separated by a majority government also led by Diefenbaker.  And William 
Lyon Mackenzie King, if I read this right, was elected to a minority 
government twice in the 1920s -- the first time Canada ever had a minority 
government -- but the first of these "shifted back and forth between 
majority and minority status" due to resignations and floor crossings, 
with the result that he served as a minority Prime Minister for only about 
1 year and 2 months (within a mandate that lasted 3 years and 233 days 
altogether), and the second of these lasted only 204 days.  So even if you 
grant Mackenzie King the *entire* length of both terms -- including the 
times when his first government was a majority -- he would still have 
presided over a minority government for less time than Harper has.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_minority_governments_in_Canada#Minority_governments_by_term_of_office

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