After consultation with Her Majesty the Queen, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced on this date in 2005 that Quebec’s Michaëlle Jean would become our nation’s 27th Governor General. She then became Canada’s second female Governor General and the first Black person to represent Her Majesty the Queen in Canada. Her story is all the more remarkable when you consider that Madam Jean had arrived in Canada as a refugee in 1968. She would serve as Governor General until 2010.
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.