Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage

Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’

“CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’”

Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

Really?

Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.

As I wrote earlier this year, “In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938.” It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And it was the year 1938.

Although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938. We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

As Mitchell Kalpakgian noted in a July 6 essay headlined “Fanatical Ideas and Reasonable Convictions” in Crisis Magazine, a self-described “voice for the faithful Catholic laity” published in Manchester, New Hampshire, “A fanatic is a person obsessed with one idea, a monomaniac ruled by one dominant compulsion that governs all his thoughts and actions. He is enslaved by one predominant passion that dictates all his motives and decisions.”

While their ideas might differ, it is that fanaticism not Fascism that rules this American historical moment.

Quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic convert and apologist, Kalpakgian notes in a chapter entitled “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained that the fanatic’s thinking is too “rational” in the sense that he ‘overlooks many other considerations and ignores other evidence that surrounds him.

“The fanatic’s extreme mental concentration on one thing leads to madness at the expense of openness to larger universal truths that lead to wisdom … To think with rabid intensity on one subject consumes the mind to an unhealthy degree of concentration.

“It warps a person’s mind, making him pay undue attention to one matter and ignore objects of larger importance. The fanatic makes himself the center of the universe as only his passions count.”

Wrote Chesterton: “Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business?”

Kalpakgian writes that to be “haunted, obsessed, and enslaved by one rigid idea ultimately distorts a person’s humanity. A fanatic lives and dies for one thing only, whether it is revenge, money, work, pleasure, or fame. To think like a monomaniac eventually leads to thinking only with the head and without the conscience or the heart. Ironically, the overworking of the mind on one narrow subject breeds some degree of insanity.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason,” writes Chesterton.

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Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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