I hope readers will forgive a(nother) mention of my Scarborough, Ontario Homeland.  It was on this date in 2000 that Scarborough’s legendary Mayor Gus Harris, passed on and left for the great Scarborough Civic Centre in the sky. He had served a decade as the City of Scarborough’s Mayor – 1978-1988 – but his decades of service to what had been the Township, and then Borough of Scarborough, started after the Second World War.  Later he served as our Reeve in 1956-57. A particular point of pride for all of us with roots in Scarborough is the fact he was decades ahead of many in calling for gay rights to be recognized, having done so in the late 1970s.  He was also way ahead of his day in promoting the place of Indigenous history in Canada, particularly in Scarborough, lobbying for our community’s famed Indigenous burial site, Tabor Hill, to be recognized as a historic site. Gus Harris was one of the true builders of my beloved hometown and it is a high honour to celebrate Gus Harris today. On the federal scene, Canada lost a remarkable intellectual giant on this date in 1991 with the passing of Eugene Forsey.  An accomplished scholar, Mr. Forsey was later summoned to the Senate where his detailed knowledge of Canada’s constitution and conventions, particularly regarding dissolution, was called upon often by leaders in all parties. Fans of Arthur Meighen, like myself, will forever recall Forsey’s ringing defence of Meighen’s actions during the King-Byng Crisis over Mr. King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament in 1925.  I recall spending hour after hour reading his 1943 volume, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth when writing a term paper on King-Byng back in my student days in the 1980s. If I recall correctly, the professor I wrote it for, the late C.E.S. (Ned) Franks of Queen’s, gave me a very good mark and complimented me on my use of Forsey’s famous book.  Inspired by this, I sent my paper off to Mr. Forsey by mail and asked him if had had any reason to change his mind on the crisis since his book had been written decades before.  He sent me a short answer, “Not in the least,” he wrote.  Consistent to the end. caption id="attachment_541037" align="aligncenter" width="500" Senator Eugene Forsey/caption caption id="attachment_541038" align="aligncenter" width="500" Mayor Gus Harris/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 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.