Today is the anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald of Kington’s death in 1891. Over the decades many Prime Ministers have taken time out to pause on June 6 to celebrate the first Prime Minister. So it was that on June 6, 1930, R.B. Bennett laid a wreath at the foot of the Father of Confederation’s commanding statue at Toronto’s Queen’s Park.
“Upon the foundations that the great leader laid we still desire to build. On these foundations our party will endure, and we are proud to march under the banner that Macdonald raised,” Bennett, only months away from becoming Prime Minister, told a large audience that had gathered to pay tribute to Macdonald. “Although in his day his policies were derided, and did not all completely succeed, in his lifetime, the greatest tribute that could be paid is to say that Laurier did not dare change the principles that Macdonald laid down…By the example he has left on the pathway, I have been able to shape my political course. So long as I am with the party, his principle will shape and mould and guide its course. Though dead, he still speaketh to us words that never will be forgotten by Canadians.”
The Queen’s Park statue, which had been boxed up in recent years to protect it from vandals, once again is in full view and looks out over the nation he gave the best years of his life to serve.
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.