Canada’s federal Tories were gathered as one in Winnipeg on this date in 1927 to pick a new leader. Delegates chose R.B. Bennett, an Alberta MP who had served in the Commons from 1911 to 1919 when he then returned to private life. Two-years later Prime Minister Arthur Meighen brought him into cabinet (though he didn’t have a seat in the House) as Minister of Justice and when Meighen was briefly PM again during the King-Byng Crisis, Bennett was called into service and appointed Minister of Finance. In 1925 he returned to the Commons. In 1930, Bennett and his party earned a strong majority mandate and took office as the Great Depression grip tightened on Canada and the world. He was defeated by Mackenzie King and his Liberals in 1935 and never held the nation’s highest political office again.
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.