The public service of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was drawing to a close on this date in 1948. Liberals had gathered in convention in Ottawa to choose King’s replacement, with delegates electing Louis St.-Laurent to replace the man who had led their party for almost 30 years.
King delivered his farewell address to delegates and when he returned home to Laurier House he summed up his feelings in his famous diary.
“It was as though that those that I had loved the most and had meant most in my life had all gathered around me,” Canada’s mystic PM wrote. “In the quiet of that hour, in the peace that was in my mind, my soul roused as it was after speaking, particularly at this moment of great significance in my life. I felt as though we were all together. Certainly, we were in spirit. No one will ever make me believe that they were not all with me at the time.”
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.