Canada had a new Prime Minister on this date with the swearing-in of Arthur Meighen. He took office upon the resignation of war-time leader Sir Robert Borden. Meighen would go on to lead the nation through late 1921 and was defeated in December of that year by the ever-wily William Lyon Mackenzie King. A few years-later, in 1926, Meighen would briefly become Prime Minister again, taking office in the midst of the King-Byng constitutional crisis. Though Meighen did not serve a great deal of time in Canada’s top political office, he was in many ways the Conservative Party’s indispensable man. He led his party twice, served as Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition and in the 1930s accepted the invitation by Prime Minister R. B. Bennett to join the latter’s cabinet and to take a seat in the Red Chamber. Today, 125 years after his first becoming PM, he is still remembered as one of the greatest-ever Parliamentary performers dating back to Confederation.
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.