Today we have another Prime Ministerial birthday to celebrate as it was on this date in 1919 that Pierre Elliott Trudeau was born. He would go on to serve as Canada’s 15th Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979, and then again from 1980 to 1984. His Premiership was interrupted for nine months after he suffered defeat at the hands of Progressive Conservative Joe Clark.
Trudeau’s contributions to Canada were legion and you can read more about this ever-controversial and ground-breaking PM thanks to the good folks led by my dear friend Anthony Wilson-Smith at Historica, publishers of the Canadian Encyclopedia on-line, an incredible tool for all Canadians, at this link: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/pierre-elliott-trudeau
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.