Geills Turner
| Geills Turner | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Geills McCrae Kilgour December 23, 1937 Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater |
McGill University Harvard Business School |
| Known for | Spouse of the Prime Minister of Canada |
| Spouse(s) | John Turner (m. 1963) |
| Children | 4 |
| Relatives | David Kilgour (brother) |
Geills McCrae Kilgour Turner (first name pronounced "Jill"; born December 23, 1937) is the wife of John Turner, a former Prime Minister of Canada.
Turner, the eldest of three children, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is the grand-niece of John McCrae, author of the poem In Flanders Fields, and the sister of long time Alberta Member of Parliament David Kilgour. Her father was David Kilgour, Sr., who was the chief executive officer of Great West Life Assurance Company. Turner grew up in a wealthy family. She excelled in science and mathematics, and graduated from McGill University with a degree in math and physics. She enrolled in the post-graduate business administration course at Harvard Business School. After graduating from Harvard, she left the United States since investment firms in New York City were not interested in hiring a woman. Turner moved to Montreal to work for IBM. Author Gordon Donaldson called her an "upper-crust pretty [girl]".
She met John Turner when she was a campaign worker for his first election campaign and she "brought computers into Turner's campaign." They married in 1963 and have four children: Elizabeth (born 1964), Michael (born 1965), David (born 1968), and James Andrew (born 1972).
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.
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