Monthly Speaker Review #2

October 27, 2020 Meeting By James Rayner

Unknown and Unforgettable: A Guide to Canada’s Prime Ministers – Gary Schlee (Available on Amazon)

I wonder how many of us have yawned our way through a course in Canadian History. As a student, I found the subject mildly interesting but had to memorize a lot of dates and facts that were boring. In his address to the virtual meeting of the Club, Gary Schlee, a corporate communications expert and teacher at Centennial College, showed us that Canadian history can, indeed, be made more interesting. His current focus (since his high school days) is on Canada’s prime ministers and the oddities in their lives that can pique our interest. Without going through the whole list of office holders, he chose a representative group of former prime ministers and shared some of the peculiarities of their lives with us. Here are some of the highlights of his talk:

 John Diefenbaker failed an exam at school because he ate too much ice cream in Saskatoon and was too sick to write the exam; Diefenbaker suffered a haemorrhage after laughing at an unfortunate auto racer who went off the track into a river; and he tried five different times to be elected to various offices before finding success;

 As an eight-year old, Paul Martin was struck by polio and was rushed to the hospital in Windsor for a quick recovery. By December of that year, his father was Minister of Health and Welfare and he pushed to make the polio vaccine available to all Canadian children;

 Alexander McKenzie was a stone mason in Scotland, working with William Neil and his son. There was also a daughter, Helen, in whom Alexander was romantically interested. When the Neils moved to Canada, settling in the Kingston area, Alexander followed and found work on Wolfe Island. To pursue Helen, he had to reach the mainland, usually by boat but in the winter, he had to walk across the ice. As you might expect, he fell through the ice several times but his love of Helen made him continue the practice until they married;

Arthur Meighen was renowned as a Shakespeare expert. After he gave a speech in Vancouver and Ottawa that was full of quotes from Shakespeare, he was asked for a transcript of the speech. He had none because he had composed the speech on board a ship coming from Australia and had committed it to memory;

 John Turner, while on vacation in Barbados saved John Diefenbaker’s life by swimming out to rescue him when Diefenbaker had trouble with the waves;

 Too many rules made Jean Chrétien hate the seminary where he was sent to study, so he faked an attack of appendicitis which would mean being sent to the hospital and then home to Shawinigan, thus missing his academic year and not having to return. The doctors in Shawinigan weren’t sure about the appendix but removed it anyway. Jean was sent to another school where he did better, but the following year, his father sent him back to the seminary in Joliette;

 There has always been some discussion about the contributions of John A. MacDonald to the existence of our nation. In his opinion, the best thing he ever did for the country was to introduce The Electoral Franchise Act of 1885. Like MacDonald himself, this act had both positive and negative implications. On the positive side, the act would be administered by Ottawa, not the provinces; any man or woman who owned property could vote; Indigenous males who owned property could vote. However, in a sop to British Columbia, Canadians of Chinese origin could not vote because they lacked “British” instincts, feelings, and aspirations!

This is not the stuff of the National Enquirer or even the Kardashians but these examples serve to show that the people who have served as leaders of our national government have their own interesting stories to tell, aspects of their lives that seldom make it into news reports or textbooks.