Fred C. Mears, 80, the past Dean of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and the Montreal Gazette’s Ottawa columnist for 25-years, passed into history on this date in 1966. He had retired 14 years before after spending a total of 30 years covering politics and personalities on Parliament Hill. His Gazette obituary noted that he had been “the confidant of more cabinet ministers than you could shake a Hansard at.”
The Gazette summed up Mears’ career the following way: “A slight man and a dynamo of nervous energy, he began his newspaper career with the old Toronto News, later joining the staff of MacLean publications. He was sent to Montreal where he eventually joined the staff of The Herald. Mr. Mears later moved to The Montreal Star and to The Canadian Century, a publication put out by Max Aiken, later Lord Beaverbrook. Eighteen months later, he joined The Ottawa Citizen as city editor.
“A restless newspaperman, he stayed with the Ottawa paper from July 1910 to April1911,” the paper continued. “He then moved on to the staff of theToronto Globe and in 1922 he returned to Ottawa as its correspondent there. He held that post until after the general election of 1926 when he joined The Gazette.”
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.