47 Leaders of the Opposition (Canada)

In Canada, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, or simply the Official Opposition, is usually the largest parliamentary opposition party in the House of Commons of Canada, either on its own or as part of a governing coalition, although, in certain unusual circumstances, it may be a third or fourth-largest party or even the largest party.

Leader of the Official Opposition (Canada)

The leader of the Official Opposition, formally known as the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, is the politician who leads the Official Opposition in Canada, typically the leader of the party possessing the most seats in the House of Commons that is not the governing party or part of the governing coalition. The current Opposition leader is Erin O'Toole, who took office following his election as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada on August 24, 2020.

In Canada, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate is the leader of the largest party in the Senate not in government.

The Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet in Canada is composed of Members of Parliament of the main Opposition party responsible for holding the Government to account and for developing and disseminating the party's policy positions. Members of the Official Opposition are generally referred to as Opposition Critics, but the term Shadow Minister is also used. The Conservative Party of Canada served as the Official Opposition in the 42nd Parliament.

Ronalee "Rona" Ambrose Veitch is a Canadian former politician who was interim leader of the Conservative Party and the Leader of the Opposition between 2015 and 2017. She was the Conservative Party member of the House of Commons for Sturgeon River—Parkland between 2015 and 2017, and had previously represented Edmonton—Spruce Grove from 2004 to 2015.

Richard Bedford Bennett, 1st Viscount Bennett,, was a Canadian lawyer, businessman and politician who served as the 11th prime minister of Canada from 1930 to 1935. He led the Conservative Party from 1927 to 1938.

Dominick Edward Blake, known as Edward Blake, was the second premier of Ontario, from 1871 to 1872 and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1880 to 1887. He is one of only three federal permanent Liberal leaders never to become Prime Minister of Canada, the others being Stéphane Dion and the latter's immediate successor Michael Ignatieff. He may be said to have served in the national politics of what developed as the affairs of three nationalities: Canadian, British, and Irish. Blake was also the founder, in 1856, of the Canadian law firm now known as Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.

Sir Robert Laird Borden was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the eighth prime minister of Canada, in office from 1911 to 1920. He is best known for his leadership of Canada during World War I.

Lucien Bouchard, is a French Canadian lawyer, diplomat and retired politician.

John Bracken was an agronomist, the 11th and longest-serving premier of Manitoba (1922–1943) and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1942–1948).

Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien is a Canadian retired politician who served as the 20th prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003.

Charles Joseph Clark is a Canadian statesman, businessman, writer, and politician who served as the 16th prime minister of Canada from June 4, 1979, to March 3, 1980.

Stockwell Burt Day Jr. is a Canadian former politician, and a member of the Conservative Party of Canada. He is a former provincial cabinet minister from Alberta, serving as Minister of Labour, Minister of Social Services, and then Treasurer under Premier Ralph Klein. Already a prominent figure in Alberta politics, Day successfully ran for leader of the newly-formed Canadian Alliance against former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, winning that position on July 8, 2000, despite initially low expectations. Following his election as leader, Day won the by-election to become the Member of Parliament for the riding of Okanagan—Coquihalla in British Columbia.

John George Diefenbaker was the 13th prime minister of Canada, serving from 1957 to 1963. Between 1930 and 1979, he was the only federal Progressive Conservative leader to lead the party to an election victory, doing so three times, although only once with a majority of seats in the House of Commons of Canada.

Stéphane Maurice Dion is a Canadian diplomat, political scientist and retired politician who has been the Canadian Ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the European Union since 2017. Dion was Minister of Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from 2015 until he was shuffled out of Cabinet in 2017. He was also the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons from 2006 to 2008.

George Alexander Drew was a Canadian conservative politician who founded a Progressive Conservative dynasty in Ontario that lasted 42 years. He served as the 14th premier of Ontario from 1943 to 1948.

Gilles Duceppe is a retired Canadian politician, proponent of the Quebec sovereignty movement and former leader of the Bloc Québécois. He was a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of Canada for over 20 years and has been the leader of the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois for 15 years in three stints: 1996, 1997-2011 and in 2015. He was Leader of the Official Opposition in the Parliament of Canada from March 17, 1997, to June 1, 1997. He resigned as party leader after the 2011 election, in which he lost his own seat to New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate Hélène Laverdière and his party suffered a heavy defeat; however, he returned four years later to lead the party into the 2015 election. After being defeated in his own riding by Laverdière again, he resigned once more.

Michel Gauthier was a Canadian politician, who served as leader of the Bloc Québécois from 1996 to 1997. As the party was the Official Opposition in the Parliament of Canada, Gauthier was also the Leader of the Opposition during this time. He later recanted his sovereignist views when he joined the Conservative Party two years before his death.

William Carvel Graham is a Canadian lawyer, academic and former politician who is the Chancellor of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Graham served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of National Defence, Leader of the Opposition and interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was recently a member of the Minister's Advisory Panel for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, providing expertise and advice for the Government of Canada's Defence Review. Graham has recently authored an autobiography, titled Call of the World: A Political Memoir.

Herbert Eser Gray was a prominent Canadian politician. He served as a member of parliament for Windsor West for four decades, from 1962 to 2002; and consequently he is one of the longest serving members in Canadian history. He also served as cabinet minister under three prime ministers, and as the seventh deputy prime minister from 1997 to 2002. He was Canada's first Jewish federal cabinet minister. He is one of few Canadians granted the honorific The Right Honourable who was not so entitled by virtue of a position held.

Deborah Cleland Grey, is a Canadian former Member of Parliament from Alberta for the Reform Party of Canada, the Canadian Alliance, and the Conservative Party of Canada. She was the first female Leader of the Opposition in Canadian history. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Leaders' Debates Commission.

Hugh Guthrie, was a Canadian politician and Cabinet minister in the governments of Sir Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen and R. B. Bennett.

Richard Burpee Hanson, was a Canadian politician who served as interim leader of the Conservative Party from May 14, 1940 until November 11, 1941.

Stephen Joseph Harper is a Canadian politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015. Harper won three mandates during his nearly decade-long tenure, and is the first and only prime minister to come from the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada, serving as the party's first leader from 2004 to 2015.

Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician who served as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. Most recently, he was rector and President of Central European University; he held this position from 2016 until July 2021.

William Lyon Mackenzie King was a Canadian statesman and politician who served as the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930 and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada during both the interwar period and World War II, from the 1920s through the 1940s. He is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Second World War (1939–1945) when he mobilized Canadian money, supplies and volunteers to support Britain while boosting the economy and maintaining morale on the home front. With a total of 21 years and 154 days in office, he remains the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history. Trained in law and social work, he was keenly interested in the human condition, and played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state.

Sir Henri Charles Wilfrid Laurier, was a Canadian politician and statesman who served as the seventh prime minister of Canada, in office from 11 July 1896 to 6 October 1911.

John Gilbert Layton was a Canadian politician who served as the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 2003 to 2011 and Leader of the Official Opposition in 2011. He previously sat on Toronto City Council, occasionally holding the title of acting mayor or deputy mayor of Toronto during his tenure as city councillor. Layton was the member of Parliament (MP) for Toronto—Danforth from 2004 until his death.

Sir John Alexander Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada. The dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, he had a political career that spanned almost half a century. Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada. As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become premier under the colony's unstable political system.

Alexander Mackenzie, was a Scottish-Canadian politician who served as the second prime minister of Canada, in office from 1873 to 1878.

Robert James Manion was a Canadian politician best known for leading the Conservative Party of Canada from 1938 until 1940.

Ernest Preston Manning is a Canadian politician. He was the founder and the only leader of the Reform Party of Canada, a Canadian federal political party that evolved into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 which in turn merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form today's Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Manning represented the federal constituency of Calgary Southwest in the Canadian House of Commons from 1993 until his retirement in 2002. He served as leader of the Official Opposition from 1997 to 2000.

Daniel Duncan McKenzie, was a Canadian lawyer, judge, and politician.

Arthur Meighen was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the ninth prime minister of Canada, in office from July 1920 to December 1921 and from June to September 1926. He led the Conservative Party from 1920 to 1926 and from 1941 to 1942.

Thomas Joseph Mulcair is a Canadian retired politician from Quebec who served as the leader of the Official Opposition from 2012 to 2015, and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 2012 to 2017. He represented the riding of Outremont in the House of Commons from 2007 to 2018 as a member of Parliament (MP).

Martin Brian Mulroney is a Canadian lawyer, businessman, and politician who served as the 18th prime minister of Canada from September 17, 1984, to June 25, 1993.

The Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet in Canada was formed after the 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election. Erin O'Toole appointed a Shadow Cabinet in September 2020.

Lester Bowles Pearson was a Canadian scholar, statesman, soldier, and diplomat who served as the 14th prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968, as the head of two back-to-back Liberal minority governments won in the elections of 1963 and 1965.

John Douglas Reynolds, was the Member of Parliament for the riding of West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country in the House of Commons of Canada from 1997 to 2006 and a former Federal Opposition Leader. He had also been an MP in the 1970s as well as a provincial politician in British Columbia in the 1980s and 1990s.

Louis Stephen St. Laurent was a Canadian politician and lawyer who served as the 12th prime minister of Canada, from 15 November 1948 to 21 June 1957.

Andrew James Scheer is a Canadian politician who served as leader of the Official Opposition and the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada from 2017 until 2020. He has also been the member of Parliament (MP) for Regina—Qu'Appelle since 2004.

Robert Lorne Stanfield was a Canadian politician who served as the 17th premier of Nova Scotia from 1956 to 1967 and fought three federal elections as leader of the Opposition and leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1967–76).

Michael Starr, was a Canadian politician and the first Canadian cabinet minister of Ukrainian descent, his parents having emigrated from Halychyna (Galicia), then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Western Ukraine.

Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, also referred to by the initials "PET", was a Canadian politician who served as the 15th prime minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1968 to 1984, with a brief period instead as Leader of the Opposition in 1979 and 1980.

Sir Charles Tupper, 1st Baronet, was a Canadian father of Confederation: served as the sixth prime minister of Canada from May 1 to July 8, 1896. As the premier of Nova Scotia from 1864 to 1867, he led Nova Scotia into Confederation. He briefly served as the Canadian prime minister, from seven days after parliament had been dissolved, until he resigned on July 8, 1896 following his party's loss in the 1896 Canadian federal election. His 69-day tenure as prime minister is the shortest in Canadian history.

Nycole Turmel is a Canadian politician who served as the Member of Parliament for Hull—Aylmer from 2011 to 2015 and served as the Opposition Whip in the New Democratic Party shadow cabinet.

John Napier Wyndham Turner was a Canadian politician and lawyer who served as the 17th prime minister of Canada from June 30 to September 17, 1984.