The Top 5 Longest Serving Canadian Prime Ministers

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Canadian Prime Ministers Can Serve Forever

There is no limit to how many years a Canadian Prime Minister can serve. Unlike in other countries such as the United States where they kick out their President every eight years, Canadian Prime Ministers can serve their country until either: Her Majesty the Queen of Canada kicks them out, the people of Canada kick them out, they resign or they die. There's no such thing as "impeaching" a Canadian P. M. either, so other than the options mentioned above, Canadian Prime Ministers can serve pretty much into infinity and beyond.

William Lyon Mackenzie King was born in Berlin and Spoke To Ghosts

That's right. The longest serving Canadian Prime Minister was born in Berlin. Berlin, Canada that is. Berlin (the one in Canada), is now known as Kitchener in the province of Ontario. King remains the longest serving Canadian Prime Minister in history after clocking up a total of 21 years and 154 days for the Liberal party of Canada. That's a long time for any democratically-elected politician to hold on to power.

King was a very intellectually capable person who had attained no less than five university degrees during his lifetime including an MA in political economy from Harvard University in the United States (later he turned down a teaching position at Harvard to pursue politics). King was a straight-laced Presbyterian and people can be forgiven that from a distance at least, he appeared to be a bit of a boring, albeit effective politician and Prime Minister. However, as is often the case in public figures, appearances can be totally deceiving.

Mackenzie King Contacted the Dead on a Regular Basis?

Right, that leads us to this other little detail; the longest-serving Prime Minister in Canadian history held seances, consulted mediums, and spoke to the dead. A little-known fact at the time, King, the Prime Minister and master of all of Canada, practiced some of the elements of Spiritualism, which at the time, was a kind of religious movement. Spiritualism is based on the belief that non-dead humans can speak and communicate with very-dead humans. While many people may find that slightly kooky, a lot of people took that pretty seriously back in the day. Pulitzer-prize winner Deborah Blum gives a riveting account of those days in her fantastic book: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, which explains how some very serious noble-prize winning scientists decide to investigate whether there really was an afterlife and if our dead could really be contacted. Scoff if you like, but these respected scientists did serious research into the paranormal where others would not dare.

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