Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary today. They were married on this date in 1973 in Montreal. Theirs’ has always been a particularly close marriage and there is little doubt that Brian Mulroney would not have become Prime Minister without Mila’s love and support.
To mark their special anniversary, I’ll refer back to the Mulroney Memoirs (on which I proudly served as Mr. Mulroney’s assistant for five years) and quote from a passage the 18th Prime Minister wrote in his personal journal on the couple’s anniversary in 1987.
“Just before Mitterrand’s visit, Mila and I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary. While prime ministers receive impressive gifts when they travel abroad representing their country, no gift could ever come close to meaning as much as the one I found on my desk on May 26, 1987.
‘I am so proud of you and the work that you are doing,’ Mila wrote. ‘Your day is coming, slowly but surely. For my part I cannot find the words to express how I truly feel, the pride and the joy and the respect. You have my love and friendship and support always.’”
It is a particular personal pleasure for me to send out anniversary congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Mulroney from Art’s History today.
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.