John McDermid
former Canadian federal politician (1940–2024)
John Horton McDermid, PC, FRI (17 March 1940 – 6 December 2024) was a Canadian politician.
Life and career
Born as David Michael Date to a teenage mother, he was adopted by Reverend John McDermid and his wife, Nora.
McDermid worked in marketing, public relations and broadcasting before he entered politics. He was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in the 1979 federal election as the Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Brampton—Georgetown outside of Toronto, Ontario.
He was re-elected in the 1980, 1984 and 1988 elections. He became a parliamentary secretary when the Tories took power in 1984. From 1988 to 1993, he served in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as series of junior minister positions: Minister of State for Housing (1988–1989), International Trade (1988-1989), Privatization and Regulatory Affairs (1989–1991), and Finance and Privatization (1991–1993).
He left Cabinet with the departure of Mulroney as Prime Minister of Canada in June 1993, and did not run in the 1993 federal election.
McDermid received the Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee Medal (2002) in his role as Lieutenant Colonel, the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012), and the King Charles III Coronation Medal (2024).
McDermid died through euthanasia on 6 December 2024, at the age of 84.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John McDermid” is former Canadian federal politician (1940–2024). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, McDermid and former, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “former Canadian federal politician (1940–2024)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16105415. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2024, 1979 and 1980.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “John McDermid” 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.