Canada’s third Prime Minister, Sir John Abbott, the first native-born Canadian to hold Canada’s highest political post, passed into history on this date in 1893. His failing health had forced him less than a year earlier to resign as PM and make way for Sir John Thompson. Abbott was 72 when he died at home in Montreal.
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.