The last week in Canada has been one heck of a political ride with the economic update leading to a coalition opposition looking to take power from the reigning Conservative government. If you want to read about the full week of details, check out The Globe and Mails Political section.

Got me wondering, with these 5 political leaders in a history making battle, what would Canada’s leading directories tell us about these political leaders and their names.

To recap, here are the players (there names link to Wikipedia, if you want to read more about them):

Stephan Harper, Conservative Leader and Current Prime Minister

Stéphane Dion, Liberal Leader and Proposed New Prime Minister

Jack Layton, Leader of The New Democrats

Gilles Duceppe, Leader of the Bloc Québécois

Elizabeth May, Leader of the Greens

Now that we have the players, what can we learn about their last names?

Let’s start with Canada 411, Canada’s most used people finder directory. I will conduct a search for each political leaders last name within the country and the top 2 provinces that contain that last name. Here are the results (if you want to see the full results, click on the name below):

Harper in Canada – 3150 results with the most coming from Harper in Ontario (1505) followed by Harper in British Columbia (476).

Dion in Canada – 13,042 results with the most coming from Dion in Quebec (10,979) followed by Dion in Ontario (1065).

Layton in Canada – 395 results with the most coming from Layton in Ontario (134) followed by Layton in Alberta (105).

Duceppe in Canada – 100 results with the coming from for Duceppe in Quebec (99) followed by Duceppe in Alberta (1).

May in Canada – 12,260 results with the most coming from May in Ontario (5017) followed by May in Quebec (2481).

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Now, let’s turn our focus on business searches searches using YellowPages.ca – Canada’s Most Used business directory. For these searches, we have filtered based on businesses that contain the last name of our 5 political leaders along with the top 2 most references business categories. Here are the results:

Harper in Canada – 156 results with the most common business heading being Engines-Diesel (12) and Lawyers (12) followed by General Contractors (6).

Dion in Canada – 436 results with the most common business heading being Dentists (22) followed by Auto Repair Garages (21).

Layton in Canada – 37 results with the most common business heading being Dentists (5) followed by Lawyers (3) and Roofing Contractors (3).

Duceppe in Canada – 6 results with the most common business heading being Theaters (3) followed by Lawyers (2).

May in Canada – 1734 results with the most common business heading being Lawyers (54) followed by Restaurants (50).

So there you have it, the 5 political leaders in Canada looked at from the view of Canada’s directories.

Check out Canada’s Top 20 Surnames Dissected if you are interested in more numbers.