Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper announced that he was taking politics out of the appointments of Governors General and provincial Lt-Governors on this date in 20212. He did so by announcing the appointment of an official non-partisan group of constitutional experts and historians to advise him on such appointments.
Earlier, there had been an ad-hoc committee of excerpts who had provided Prime Minister Harper with a list of five names to assist him as he searched for a new Governor General. His choice was, of course, David Johnston, widely now considered one of the great Governors General in our recent history.
Unfortunately, the expert committee process was dismantled under PM Harper’s successor. There can be little doubt that had the serious vetting process been left in place the Julie Payette fiasco would have been avoided.
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.