The Truth is in Here? U.S. National Archives set to release final JFK assassination records Oct. 26

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland is set to release on Oct. 26 the final 3,000 never-before-seen documents the federal government says it holds related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.

An additional 34,000 previously redacted files are also scheduled for release with the redacted text restored for the new releases. Under the terms of The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the United States government was given 25 years to make public all Kennedy assassination-related files. That deadline expires Thursday. President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 21 that “subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” The records are to be released this week “unless the president certifies, as required by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm, including harm to intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. A statement from the White House on Saturday said: “The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted from filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which added more fuel to 28 years of inflamed public fascination with the idea of conspiracy and cover-up connected to the Kennedy assassination, despite the official finding of the 1964 Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released at 8 a.m. on July 24 a set of 3,810 documents, along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released July 24 were available online only initially, with access to the original paper records promised “at a future date.” The National Archives and Records Administration established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection, about 88 percent, has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the National Archives says.

Highlights of the July 24 release included FBI and CIA records and 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964. The set of documents released in July included 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. The redacted text is restored for the new releases.

Josh Sanburn, a writer for TIME, suggested last December “the files – many of which trace back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the 1970s – promise to be less about second shooters and grassy knolls and more about what the government, particularly the CIA, might have known about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.”

According to the National Archives, the final records release includes information on the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald. “The documents could also provide information on a CIA officer named George Joannides, who directed financial dealings with an anti-Castro group whose members had a public fight with Oswald on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963,” says Sanburn.

As President Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day. Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago, was the fourth United States president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Some conspiracies, however, are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.  In April 2016, then Republican presidential primaries candidate Donald Trump accused Canadian-born Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, a Cuban-American Christian preacher, of being alongside Lee Harvey Oswald several months before he shot the president, “channeling a National Enquirer story that the Cruz campaign has denounced as false,” wrote McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Maria Recio for the Miami Herald at the time. Responding in Indiana, Ted Cruz, challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, quipped: “I guess I should go ahead and admit that yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

The assassination of Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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‘In Jerusalem and in Athens, lightning struck. Socrates asked the question: “What is the right way for a man to live?”‘

Skyline of the Old City and Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Israel.

“In Jerusalem and in Athens, lightning struck. Socrates asked the question: ‘What is the right way for a man to live? … that lightning has remade the world,” says Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn, a professor of politics and history, in his opening remarks to the first lecture, “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Study of History at Hillsdale College” in the school’s free online version of its freshman core course, History 101: Western Heritage — From the Book of Genesis to John Locke.

This is indeed powerful stuff. It presents the kind of questions I have long wanted to take some time to study and ponder in more depth in ancient and medieval history.

While I have a master’s degree in history, my focus was on 20th century American history (which I studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada in the mid-1990s). Queen’s is a fine school and has a wonderful graduate program with some terrific professors. I was blessed to have the privilege to study there.

And historic Kingston, the Limestone City, is a very pleasant place to live, albeit skewed somewhat demographically to being home to scores of those who spend their days in the hallowed halls of either academia or behind the walls of the goodly number of federal penitentiaries that also call Kingston and surrounding area home (a number that has decreased though by two with the closure since my graduate student days of both Kingston Penitentiary and Prison for Women). At its peak, there were 10 federal prisons, ranging from minimum to maximum security, in Kingston and the countryside adjacent to the city.  Joyceville, Pittsburgh, Collins Bay, Frontenac, Bath and Millhaven remain very much in operation. On the academic side there is the aforementioned Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College, plus numerous specialized military schools, including the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence, Canadian Forces School of Communications and Electronics, the Peace Support Training Centre, Canadian Forces Military Law Centre and the Canadian Army Command and Staff College at Fort Frontenac. The military educational facilities in Kingston, just by their very names, suggest the sort of specialized education offered by the modern scriptorium. Civilian graduate school is not so very different most places. While there are significant differences between studying for a master’s or doctorate degree in history (the latter requires an original contribution in knowledge to the field and some foreign language proficiency and takes longer), both endeavors are specialized and research focused, although the M.A., which allows for the use of more secondary sources, somewhat less so. My field of 20th century American history is actually not even that broad, truth be told. It narrows down to diplomatic history and foreign relations, more specifically the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989. Nice thesis title though: America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan.

What I yearn for now that I have the luxury of time to do so is to study the canon of Western Civilization in a more core or foundational way. In other words to be terribly politically incorrect, studying dead white men and their Great Books. Fortuitously for me, I discovered Hillsdale College s few months ago.

Founded as Michigan Central College in Spring Arbor, Michigan in 1844, the school moved nine years later to Hillsdale and assumed its current name. As stated in its Articles of Association, the college undertakes its work “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land, and believing that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”

Though established by Freewill Baptists, Hillsdale has been officially non-denominational since its inception. It was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery. It was also the second college in the United States to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women.

Hillsdale sent a larger percentage of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other American college or university except West Point. Of the more than 400 who fought for the Union, four won the Congressional Medal of Honor, three became generals, and many more served as regimental commanders. Two of those Hillsdale veterans helped carry Lincoln’s casket to the slain president’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Sixty gave their lives during the Civic War.

Because of the College’s anti-slavery reputation and its role in founding the new Republican Party among the notable speakers who visited its campus during the Civil War era were Frederick Douglass, the famed African-American social reformer and abolitionist, and Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded president Abraham Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. While Everett gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” which lasted less than two minutes:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

The orator I am studying at the moment predates both Lincoln and Everett — by about 3,000 years, give or take a few centuries. Homer, believed to be the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is the first and greatest of the epic poets, and his writing is central to the Western canon, albeit we’re not quite sure when he lived, or for that matter, if he lived at all. There are some, shall we say, historical ambiguities when it comes to Homer.

Nonetheless this is the beginning. This is where we come. Says Hillsdale College pro­fessor of English and dean of  faculty Stephen Smith, in introducing the second lecture for Great Books 101: Ancient to Medieval: “The Iliad is a poem of rage: Rage is the first word of the poem, and Achilles’ rage is a major theme of the story. The Iliad is a poem of desire, especially the characters’ desires that make them who they are, but also lead to their destruction.

“The Iliad is a poem of delusion: The characters are constantly blaming the gods for their troubles instead of their own free will or choices. The Iliad is a poem of deception, perhaps most notably in the case of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, who dies in battle because of Achilles’ lie. The Iliad is a poem of disaster and double-dealing, especially the double-dealing of Achilles that leads to the disastrous death of his friend. The Iliad is a poem of death and outrage: Achilles re-enters the battle against Troy after the death of Patroclus and kills numerous Trojans, including Hector, dragging his body around the walls of Troy. This outrage turns Achilles’ glory from a high into a low point.

“The Iliad is a poem of responsibility and evasion: Achilles has been evading his responsibility, but at the same time he is responsible for the death of his friend. The Iliad ends when Zeus says he will bring the fighting to an end and grant Achilles his glory — a glory that Achilles wins not through battle, but by returning Hector’s body to his father. Achilles’ glory is to be free of his rage, which is the beginning of virtue.”

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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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