December is indeed a month for milestones in the life of Sir Mackenzie Bowell.  He was born in December, died in December and became Prime Minister on this day in December. The latter is my focus today.  Folks will recall that Prime Minister Sir John Thompson died at Windsor Castle on December 12, 1894.  Mackenzie Bowell was sworn-in as his replacement on December 21.  This means that Canada had no Prime Minister for nine full days. And this wasn’t the first time we went without a leader.  Recall that the greatest Prime Minister of them all (along with Laurier), Sir John A. Macdonald, was summoned to the great House of Commons in the sky on June 6, 1891.  Well, it wasn’t until June 16, 1891 that his successor, Sir John Abbott, was sworn in.  So, in the Macdonald-Abbott succession, Canada had no PM for ten days. Then we have the case in 1926 when, at the height of the King-Byng constitutional crisis, Mackenzie King broke all the rules and resigned suddenly before the Crown had a new advisor as PM.  Once again, Canada had no Prime Minister for a short time.  This remains a black mark on Mr. King’s career but more on the King-Byng affair – the constitutional crisis that keeps on giving – later. Canada without a Prime Minister?  It has happened.  You heard it here first. caption id="attachment_526738" align="aligncenter" width="441" Sir Mackenzie Bowell/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also proudly served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.