John Diefenbaker
13th Prime Minister of Canada (1895-1979)
John George Diefenbaker (September 18, 1895 – August 16, 1979) was the 13th prime minister of Canada, serving from 1957 to 1963. He was the only Progressive Conservative party leader between 1935 and 1979 to lead the party to an election victory, doing so three times, although only once with a majority of the seats in the House of Commons.
Diefenbaker was born in the small town of Neustadt in Southwestern Ontario. In 1903, his family migrated west to the portion of the North-West Territories that would soon become the province of Saskatchewan. He grew up in the province and was interested in politics from a young age. After service in World War I, Diefenbaker became a noted criminal defence lawyer. He contested elections through the 1920s and 1930s with little success until he was finally elected to the House of Commons in 1940. Diefenbaker was repeatedly a candidate for the party leadership. He gained that position in 1956, on his third attempt.
In the 1957 federal election, Diefenbaker led the Progressive Conservatives to its first electoral victory in 27 years; a year later, he called a snap election and spearheaded them to one of their greatest triumphs.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128614. VIAF identifies the subject as 13101121. The Library of Congress control number is n50025505. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1979, 1957 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Diefenbaker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.