Canada’s political elite were out in full force on this date in 1920 as the Canadian Bar Association’s annual meeting was held in Ottawa. Former American President William Howard Taft, who would soon make history by his appointment by President Warren Harding as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was the CBA’s guest of honour. The Ottawa Citizen reported on the high-power group of Canadians came out to honour Taft.
“There were members of the profession from every province of Canada; there were the Prime Minister (Arthur Meighen) and the ex-Prime Minister (Sir Robert Borden), and there were eminent representatives of the bar of the United States and Great Britain,” the paper noted, “judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, of the high courts of the provinces throughout the Dominion, and lawyers, eminent and near-eminent, from almost every considerable community in the country were there. There was also at the table His Excellency the Governor General (the Duke of Devonshire), His Excellency the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Auckland Geddes, and ex-president Taft.”
President Taft was greeted by delegates with a standing ovation.
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.