All eyes in official Ottawa were on the House of Commons on this date in 1873 when the first-ever Liberal budget in the young Dominion’s history was laid before MPs. Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Minister of Finance, Richard Cartwright, started his address by admitting that he and his fellow cabinet ministers were rookies with little (if any) executive experience. The Liberals, of course, had taken office only weeks before when Sir John A. Macdonald was forced to resign due to the Pacific Scandal.
“Before proceeding to discuss the minor details of the budget,” he said, “I desire to say a word or two as to the position in which the Government finds itself placed on this occasion. Sir, we have not only a new Government meeting a new House, but, as is well known, a large portion of the Government is composed of gentlemen who, like myself, have had no special official experience, and we find ourselves at the very commencement of our career confronted with difficulties of no small magnitude, of which I will take leave to say that the financial difficulties are not the least prominent or the least embarrassing.”
“The House is aware only four or five months have elapsed since the present Government took office, and I may add, that of these four or five months, we have scarcely been able to give at the outside more than two months to the special measures with which we found ourselves charged, owing to the… election… Therefore, it is not possible that on minor points, I should be able to speak as confidently as I would hope to have done, had a few weeks more been placed at my disposal.”
True political history junkies will find the rest of Cartwright’s budget address at this link: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t48p6f40q&seq=5
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.