Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier was in Ottawa on this date in 1905. He attended a rally in support of the Jews of Russia, then the subject of anti-Jewish pogroms.
“I have small hope, indeed, that anything that we may say this evening may reach St. Petersburg, but it will swell the volume of the remonstrances of the objurgations, which from all parts of the civilized world will be conveyed to the authorities at St. Petersburg, and compel them, if possible, to put an end to the existing atrocities,” he told his audience.
“I am here as a citizen of Canada because I believed it my duty to be here, when as a Canadian and a British subject one must be proud to assert the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God,” he said.
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.