UBC’s citation for Creighton that day read as follows: “If the public image of Canada is gradually developing clarity and depth; if Canadians are beginning to take pride in the vision and determination that created a country from the vast reaches of a continent; if our first first citizen emerges from the perspective of history as a player who created the part; then the author of "Dominion of the North", "The Young Politician" and "The Old Chieftain" also emerges as a creative interpreter of that past, a great teacher to his own and succeeding generations and a writer whose imagination and style matches the range and reach of his subject.

I now present to you, Mr. Chancellor, for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Donald Grant Creighton, Professor and Head of the Department of History of the University of Toronto, scholar, teacher, writer, transmitter of the vision and power of Sir John A. Macdonald – perhaps even by virtue of this forerunner of the conservative renaissance. Mr. Chancellor – Donald Grant Creighton.”

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.