It was a great day to be a Canadian Tory on this date in 1911. Robert L. Borden, who had ended the great Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s 15-years-in government the previous month, took office as the nation’s eighth Prime Minister. He would go on to lead Canadian through the First World War and retired, exhausted and ill, in 1920. Borden would pass into history in 1937.
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.