It was on this date in 1941 that Mackenzie King lost his closest Quebec colleague, the great Ernest Lapointe, with the latter starting his journey to the great House of Commons in the sky. So great was the trust in him by Prime Minister King that, up until his death, Lapointe had been, in effect, almost a co-Prime Minister when it came to federal matters in Quebec.
In the aftermath of Lapointe’s death and state funeral, Prime Minister King turned to a Quebec City lawyer to take his fallen friend’s place. That man’s name? Louis St.-Laurent and the rest, as they say, is history.
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.