Canada’s 16th Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Joe Clark, officially sat for the first time in the PM’s chair in the Commons on this date in 1979. He had defeated Pierre Trudeau and his Liberals the previous May, becoming the only leader to have ever bested his predecessor in a national campaign. Little could the new PM and his ministers and MPs have known on October 9, 1979 their time on the Treasury Benches would be brief. The Clark government would be defeated on a confidence motion in the Commons in December of 1979.
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.