Sixty-four-years-ago tonight the political earth moved as John Diefenbaker and his Tories won a remarkable 208 seats in Canada’s 24^th General Election.  Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals were reduced to 48 seats, a loss of 57 compared to their showing only nine months before. Dief received 54 per cent of the vote while Pearson had to settle for 34 per cent. It is also worth noting that approximately 80 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots, significantly more than the turnout in more recent elections.Years later, writing in his memoirs about election night, Pearson was still able to find some humour when looking back on the evening. “My wife,” he wrote, “who until that time had stood up bravely to the evidence of a great defeat, finally broke down. ‘We’ve lost everything,’ she moaned, ‘we’ve even won our own constituency!’”caption id="attachment_611051" align="alignleft" width="394" John Diefenbaker/captionArthur 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.