R.B. Bennett and his Tories earned a majority mandate from Canadians on this date in 1930. With 74 percent of the electorate turning out to vote, Canada’s Conservatives increased their seat count by 46, winning a total of 137 seats in a House that was then made up of 245. Mackenzie King’s Liberals trailed with only 89 seats, a decline of 27 seats. Bennett would then leader Canada through the dark days of the Great Depression, and was defeated when he sought re-election in 1935.
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.