Donald Johnston, who served as a minister in Pierre Elliott Trudeau's Liberal government in the early 1980s, has died, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday.
The circumstances of his death were not known Monday. He was 85 years old.
Johnston was the first Canadian to become secretary general of the OECD, in 1996.
Born in Ottawa in June 1936, he studied civil law at McGill University in Montreal, where he settled. He then served for 10 years as the member of parliament for Westmount, and then for Saint-Henri--Westmount, from 1978 to 1988.
In Trudeau Sr.'s last government, from 1980 to 1984, he served as president of the Treasury Board, minister of state for science and technology and minister of state for economic and regional development.
When Trudeau retired from politics in 1984, Johnston ran for the party leadership, coming in third behind John Turner and Jean Chrétien. In the short-lived Turner government, he served as justice minister for two and a half months.
- This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Feb. 7, 2022
