Canadian voters, scarred by the Great Depression, returned Mackenzie King and his Liberals to power by delivering them a majority mandate on this date in 1935. King, of course, had just spent five-years in the political wilderness after his defeat by R.B. Bennett in the 1930 general election. “I marked my ballot for (the Liberal candidate) and walked out and back rejoicing in the beauty of the day,” he wrote in his famous personal diary after voting in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill.
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.