Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper was in Victoria, British Columbia, on this date in 2010. He was in the provincial capital to address MLAs on the eve of the Vancouver Olympics. The 22nd Prime Minister was making history as his speech was the first-ever given by a PM to the B.C. Legislature.
“There is nothing wrong, and there is much that is right, in celebrating together when our fellow citizens, perceiving some splendid star high above us willingly pay the cost and take the chance to stretch forth their hands to try to touch it for that one shining moment,” Harper said. “For, no good thing is without risk, no ideal can be reached without sacrifice. Ask any Olympian who wears the Maple Leaf.”
“The 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games have been an unparalleled organizational and logistical undertaking,” Harper continued. “They will be simply the most ambitious sporting event ever held on Canadian soil.”
With the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics opening the following day, the Prime Minister made clear his national pride and love of country.
“I know that thoughts of grandeur and boisterous displays of nationalism we tend to associate with others,” he said. “And, over the centuries, things have been done around the world in the name of national pride or love of country that would have been better left undone. Yet, we should never cast aside our pride in a country so wonderful in a land we are so fortunate to call home, merely because the notion has sometimes been abused.”
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.