It is a great pleasure to send birthday greetings upward to the great Red Chamber in the sky to Sir John Abbott, the first-ever Canadian-born Prime Minister. He was born on this date in what is now Quebec in 1821. A brilliant lawyer, who would also serve two-terms as Mayor of Montreal, was named Prime Minister upon the death of the great Sir John A. Macdonald in June 1891, serving in Canada’s highest-political post from his perch in the Senate until ill-health forced him to resign 18 months later.
Not long before assuming office as PM, he wrote the following in a letter to a friend. Every Prime Minister that has followed him has surely felt the same way privately during difficult times in their premierships. “I hate politics, and what are considered their appropriate methods,” he said. “I hate notoriety, public meetings, public speeches, caucuses and everything that I know of that is apparently the necessary incident of politics, except doing public work to the best of my ability.”
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.