Canada’s 14^th Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Lester B. Pearson, was on familiar ground in New York on this date in 1963. He was the United Nations to address the UN General Assembly. “We are eighteen years old now,” the only Canadian to have ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize said. “The League of Nations was eighteen years old in 1938. That was the year of appeasement, of unawareness, of failure of heart and nerve. The eighteenth year of the United Nations opens in a climate of greater hope. We can make it the beginning of the end of the situation where a man can communicate with a missile a million miles away, but not with another man whom he watches warily over a curtain of fear and suspicion. Shortly before his premature and greatly lamented death, Albert Camus wrote: ‘Since atomic war would divest any future of its meaning, it gives us complete freedom of action. We have nothing to lose except everything.’ Well, I say: let's go ahead. This is the Assembly of opportunity. We can make it, if we will, the Assembly of action for peace.” You can read Mr. Pearson’s entire address at this link. caption id="attachment_530486" align="alignleft" width="280" Lester B. Pearson/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.