Though they retained 40 per cent of the popular vote, Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his Liberals lost a whopping 61 seats in the Commons when the polls closed and ballots were counted on this date in 1945. John Bracken and his Tories won 67 seats (but saw their percentage of the vote drop to 28 per cent). The CCF won 28 seats; Social Credit 23; the Bloc Populaire from Quebec 2; and a single Labour Progressive was elected. Still, power is power and when Canadians returned to the polls four years later, the Liberals, this time under Louis St. Laurent, were rewarded with a massive majority victory
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.