As part of the IRPP’s 40th anniversary, 30 eminent historians, political scientists, economists, journalists and policy advisers from across Canada were asked by Policy Options to pick their top 5 choices for best provincial premier since the
Institute’s founding in 1972, and their collective choice was emphatic: Peter Lougheed by a landslide. Not only did he receive 21 of 30 possible first-place votes, he also ran the table on nine questions related to leadership, fiscal and
economic management, and intergovernmental relations. IRPP Research Director Jeremy Leonard, who collected and tabulated the results, dissects the numbers behind the rankings.
he returns are in from the Policy Options panel of 30 jurors — eminent historians, political scientists, economists, journalists and policy advisers from across Canada — on the best provincial premiers to have held office since the founding of the IRPP 40 years ago.
From a list of 18 potential candidates, they were asked to select their choices of the five best and rank them from 1 to 5. The ranking points are calculated as the weighted sum of all top-5 votes received by the premier in question, with a number 1 ranking counting for 5 points, a number 2 ranking counting for 4 points, and so on.
Table 1 shows the “long list” of potential choices and reveals a decisive winner: Peter Lougheed, who served as premier of Alberta from September 1971 to November 1985. With 130 total ranking points, he was far ahead of his nearest contender, William Davis of Ontario, who had 84.
Acloser look at the ranking statistics for the Top 5 choices shows just how decisive the jury was. Lougheed was the only premier who was included in the top 5 picks of all 30 jurors, and 21 of those 30 picks were for the number 1 position. It is also interesting that runner-up William Davis did not receive any first-place votes — he was a clear number 2 rather than a competitor with Lougheed for the number 1 spot. In fact, 11 of the 30 jurors chose Lougheed and Davis as winner and
runner-up.
There was a close race for third place and fourth place, but Allan Blakeney edged Frank McKenna in both the percentage of jurors including them in the Top 5 and the distribution of those votes. It can be fairly said that Robert Bourassa squeaked into the top 5 by a nose.
Nine of the 30 jurors (30 percent) included him in their top 5 choices, one less than for Roy Romanow and the same number as for Danny Williams. But the votes for the latter two were heavily skewed toward the number 4 and number 5 positions, whereas Bourassa received one each of first-, second- and third-place votes, making him the only other premier to receive more than 20 ranking points.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Instritute for Research on Public Policywebsite: http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/jun12/leonard.pdf