Canada’s 15th Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Pierre Trudeau, passed into history on this date in 2000. He had served as PM from 1968 until 1979 and then again from 1980 to 1984. At his death Joe Clark, his opponent of many years, gave perhaps the greatest tribute to his fallen foe. “Like Canada’s first controversial Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, Pierre Trudeau would have built the railway,” Clark told the Commons. Trudeau was 80 at his death and is buried at Saint-Rémi Cemetery, Saint-Rémi, Quebec.
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.