Canada’s Progressive Conservatives were gathered in Edmonton on this date in 2002 for a policy convention when their leader since 1998, the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, announced his that he’d be stepping down as their leader. This ended the remarkable career in elected politics that had seen the pride of High River Alberta become the youngest-ever Prime Minister in 1979 and then hold the crucial posts of Secretary of State for External Affairs and Minister of Constitutional Affairs under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
“I've carried the party, I think, as far as I can. I'm immodest enough to think I carried it through some difficult times that others might not have been able to do,” he said in making his resignation announcement, “but we're here now, we're facing a different set of challenges, and that requires some changes.”
Clark’s PC party would later merge with the conservative movement that had found its genesis in the Reform Party and then enjoy nine-years almost a decade in power under Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper starting in 2006.
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.