Leader of the Opposition Pierre Trudeau spoke to a gathering of Liberal International in Ottawa on this date in 1979. He advised delegates that their respective parties should seek to strive to always occupy the middle of the political spectrum if they wished to find success.
“"We should remember that being in the centre is not always exciting,” he said. “We are often scorned by the true believers, by those who are looking for absolute truths. But we must not concern ourselves with being, as it were, at some point on the political spectrum. We just have to remind ourselves that there is a totalitarianism of the right, as well as of the left.”
Wise words.
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.