Canada’s new Liberal leader, Wilfrid Laurier, joined with members of Montreal’s Scottish community on this date to celebrate poet Robbie Burns along with the success of the Scottish in Canada. The press described Laurier as the “sliver-tongued orator” and covered his address extensively. “It was not at all inconsistent with the idea of a Canadian nationality for the different peoples in the country to celebrate the festivals which recalled to their mind the land of their ancestors,” Laurier said. “Whether we be Scotch, Irish, English or French it makes us all the better Canadians to keep green in our hearts the memory of the country from which they had come.”
Laurier received great applause from his appreciative audience when he quoted Robbie Burns. The applause continued when the Liberal leader said there were not a people more honest, thrifty, industrious and worthy a people as the Scottish of Lower Canada. Laurier joked that an old Scottish settler he had met in his youth told him that French Canadians are a good people, despite the fact they played cards on Sundays.
“Let us so shape our lives,” Laurier said in concluding his remarks, “that our children may be as proud of Canada as we are as proud of the country of our fathers. My last words are, above all else, let us be Canadian.”
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.