Today would have been the birthday of one of the most remarkable leaders the Progressive Conservative Party has ever had. I speak, of course, of the late Rt. Hon. Robert Lorne Stanfield.A ground-breaking former Premier of Nova Scotia, Canada’s Tories elected Mr. Stanfield their leader at the storied 1967 leadership convention at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. He then led his party through three national campaigns – 1968, 1972 (where he came that close to wrestling power from Pierre Trudeau) and 1974.Along the way he earned the respect of partisans of all parties and attracted brilliant young Tories to his office such as Hugh Segal, Joe Clark and Lowell Murray, amongst others. Mr. Stanfield also modernized the party, forcing it to come to terms with the reality that was Quebec and French-speaking Canada and advocating forward-looking policies such as his study of the Guaranteed Annual Income, a discussion still ongoing today led by his former staffer, Hugh Segal.One of his principal Quebec advisors was a young Montreal lawyer by the name of Brian Mulroney. Years later, as part of Canada 125 celebrations in 1992, then PM Mulroney awarded him the honorific “Right Honourable,” a move applauded by all.Back in my journalism school days in the early 1990s he granted me the high honour of a lengthy in-person interview with him for a paper I was writing. I recall like yesterday his delicious sense of humour and fun, aspects of his character and presence not often apparent to the wider public. To this day I consider it to have been a special privilege to have been able to interview Mr. Stanfield.I know that partisans of all stripes will join me today in recognizing the memory of this passionate Canadian who once graced our politics.[caption id="attachment_550508" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Robert Stanfield (1914-2003)[/caption]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.