Geills Turner

Who is Geills Turner?

Geills McCrae Kilgour Turner is the wife of John Napier Turner, a former Prime Minister of Canada. They have four children, one daughter and three sons.

Turner was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is the great-niece of John McCrae, author of the poem In Flanders Fields, and the sister of long time Alberta Member of Parliament David Kilgour. She went to Harvard Business School and was employed at IBM. Author Gordon Donaldson called her an "upper-crust pretty [girl]".

Her contribution to John Turner's political life included being a "campaign worker" for him in the Canadian federal election of 1962, and she "brought computers into Turner's campaign."

Besides this, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation states that "She was not keen to subsume her personality to further her husband’s goals, and for the most part stayed out of the spotlight." She also did not like the way she was portrayed in the press and therefore tried to stay away from it. In his book Birds of a Feather: The Press and the Politicians, Allan Fotheringham claimed that Turner tried to exact her revenge on the press during the 1988 election campaign by secretly taking photographs of journalists partying on a campaign bus, with an eye toward publishing them in a magazine. The photographs were never subsequently published, however, and Fotheringham states that John Turner himself most likely killed the idea.