Canada’s 17th Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. John Napier Turner, was born in England on this date in 1929. When his father died his mother Phyllis took the future PM and his sister home to Canada. She was destined to become the highest-ranked female civil servant of her era while raising two kids as a single mother. John would grow up in Ottawa in the Sandy Hill area of the capital and go on to study at the University of British Columbia. He the won a Rhodes Scholarship and his rise through politics in Canada began not long after.
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.