By the time the Spanish flu pandemic ended approximately 50,000 Canadians were dead. No part of the nation was spared as the deadly flu ripped through the country. In Ottawa, future Prime Minister Mackenzie King described how the virus was impacting the national capital.
“The Spanish influenza, which is prevalent everywhere, is a terrible disease,” he wrote in his diary on this date in 1918. “It is like a plague and prevalent everywhere. The city hall is surrounded by Red Cross cars and young girl workers are doing splendid service in all parts of the city. The number of families without anyone to help them, persons dying and others ill and unfed beside them – is frightful, right and left men and women are being carried off suddenly to their graves. It is a frightful plague rampant all over the world. These are strange and awful times to be living in.”
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.