John Diefenbaker and his Tories were only days from defeat on this date in 1963 as that year’s election entered its final days. But Dief wasn’t giving up without a fight. On April 6, his campaign train roared into Ontario’s Huron County and the PM visited a variety of communities, drawing large crowds everywhere he went. In Goderich, for example, Dief was greeted by hundreds at the train station and then was driven to the high school where about 1,000 people filled the auditorium to hear him speak.
You can read a full account of Dief’s visit to Huron Country that day here...
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.