Supporters of Father of Confederation Sir John A. Macdonald gathered on Parliament Hill on this date in 1890 to celebrate the unveiling of their leader’s official portrait. Sir John A.’s address that special day was interrupted several times by cheers from the crowd.
“My father before me was a Tory, and a Tory I will die,” he said, adding that he and the other Fathers of Confederation could now look out upon a nation that was already a “great and a prosperous country” they had worked so hard to shape and prosper in the young Dominion’s early days.
Sir John A. also said that the current crop of MPs, from all sides of the House, gave him great confidence in the future. “I am proud to feel and to know that in my 75th year I am surrounded by the representatives of the people from all parts of the Dominion,” he said. “I am confidently and without flattery telling you in no single Parliament that I have sat can I reckon upon a great number of able men, of honest, of men truly loyal and patriotic. (Applause.) It is a great satisfaction to me to think that when I leave the Parliament of Canada, I leave its destinies in the hands of as able a body of men as ever made up any Parliament in its existence.”
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.