It was a bad day for Canada’s turkeys on this date in 1957 as Parliament officially declared the second Monday each October as Thanksgiving. The declaration from Parliament Hill described the annual celebration “a day of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.” Earlier, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald of Kingston had made Thanksgiving an official holiday in 1876.
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.