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The assignment was simple: call the premiers’ offices and find out how tall they are. But simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. As it turns out, getting a premier’s height can be as difficult as getting their SIN number, and the accuracy of some of the answers is yet to be determined.

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Like the rising sun, I started in the East, and made my way westward. Despite a record-setting Spring snowstorm, the receptionist at Dwight Ball’s office in Newfoundland called me back almost immediately with an answer: the premier is six feet tall.

Stephen McNeil, the premier of Nova Scotia, is 6′ 7″. That one was pretty easy — his receptionist knew the number off the top of her head, saying she gets asked that question “all the time.”

So far so good — until a few “I’ll have to call you back with that one.”

And then I got to Saskatchewan.

Premier Brad Wall, understandably, has other things on his plate than answering the calls of a journalism intern, but despite that, he got back to me via his receptionist with by far the best answer of them all:

“Unless you are measuring me for a new, free suit. I am keeping it a secret,” his receptionist wrote me in an email. “But somewhere between Pallister and Clark.”

She guessed he is 5′ 10″ based on her own height, and was kind enough to indulge me in several emails back and forth on the matter.