It was on this date in 1989 that Her Majesty the Queen Mother started her final visit to Canada. She visited Toronto, London and London, traveling through a province she knew well, particularly after the famous 1939 tour of Canada she and her late husband, King George VI, criss-crossed the nation. In 1989, I was fresh out of university and working at Queen's Park as a youthful political assistant. I recall like yesterday the sense of excitement and history all of us felt when Her Majesty arrived at the Ontario Legislature. I made sure to take the afternoon off so I could see the Queen both my grandmothers had told me many times they themselves had seen when Her Majesty and the King arrived in Toronto in 1939. Both my Grandmother Milnes and my Grandmother Fines, who grew up in different parts of Toronto, always described Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother the same way: "She was so beautiful". So after I, myself, witnessed the Queen Mother being welcomed to Ontario by then Premier David Peterson and LG Lincoln Alexander, I phoned both my grandmothers excitedly when I got home from work that evening. "And she's still so beautiful," they both said. I had to agree. caption id="attachment_570943" align="aligncenter" width="496" Queen Mum, with Ontario Premier David Peterson and Lieutenant-Governor Lincoln Alexander/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.