A highly significant step towards continental defence of North America was taken on this date in 1940. Prime Minister Mackenzie King traveled from Ottawa for meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt on his FDR’s private railway car in an upper New York State village and made the now famous Ogdensburg Declaration the next day. Most importantly, it established the Permanent Joint Board of Defence and was the start of Canada’s moving away from the reliance on Great Britain in defence matters.
The joint statement between the President and Prime Minister King read as follows: “The Prime Minister and the President have discussed the mutual problems of defence in relation to the safety of Canada and the United States.
It has been agreed that a Permanent Joint Board on Defence shall be set up at once by the two countries.
This Permanent Joint Board on Defence shall commence immediate studies relating to sea, land, and air problems including personnel and material.
It will consider in the broad sense the defence of the north half of the Western Hemisphere.
The Permanent Joint Board on Defence will consist of four or five members from each country, most of them from the services. It will meet shortly.
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.