With a very happy John Diefenbaker looking on from his own seat in the Red Chamber, Her Majesty the Queen delivered the Speech from the Throne on this date in 1957. It was a very historic occasion as it marked the first-time the Queen had done so in her Canadian Parliament. She would repeat her performance 20-years-later in 1977 when she was again in Ottawa, that time to celebrate her Silver Jubilee as Canada’s Monarch.
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.