The late Lester B. Pearson would not enjoy the fact we are recalling today perhaps the worst day in his political life.  It was a Monday and, on the previous weekend in 1958, he’d been elected national leader of the Liberal party.  Entering the Commons for the first time as Leader of the Opposition, it should have been a good day of well-meaning partisan banter across the floor, a time for tributes and more.  The hard-nose politics could start the next day.But Pearson had other ideas.  He carried with him a ghost-written speech that was anything but diplomatic. “I have never regretted anything in my political career so much as my proposal that day,” he later wrote.Opposition leader Pearson concluded his speech by putting forward a motion calling on Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and his government to resign and hand power back to the Liberals!  It was regarded as the height of Liberal arrogance and demonstrated to those listening that Pearson and his Grits had learned little from their defeat seven months previous. Pearson’s mistake was obvious.  And he knew it.“I had made a spectacle out of myself by coolly inviting the government to turn over their seals of office to those of us who had, a few months earlier, been rejected by the electorate,” he wrote in his memoirs. “One of back-benchers came up to me afterwards, as I was sitting alone in a state of some depression, and said: ‘That was a magnificent speech, Mr. Pearson.  It’s too bad you didn’t stop before you ended it.’”Pearson then ducked out of the chamber to explain himself to the television cameras. And after that, enter British Columbia MP named Jimmy Sinclair, the grandfather of our current prime minister.“When I returned (Sinclair) hauled me off to his office for a drink with a few colleagues,” Pearson wrote.” He told me that my broadcast had been magnificent, that it had cleared up all doubts about the motion.  There were sweet words, though I knew they were designed more to encourage me than to voice real conviction.  I have never forgotten Jimmy Sinclair’s encouragement at that dark moment in my new political career.”Within a few minutes Pearson would be more than grateful for that drink from Jimmy Sinclair when Prime Minister Diefenbaker rose to speak to the new Leader of the Opposition’s motion. Dief’s speech went on for hours.  Later, an MP who watched it said he now wondered if Diefenbaker believed in the humane treatment of animals!  And just a few days later Mr. Diefenbaker would visit the Governor General and call the 1958 election. Mr. Pearson’s difficulties had only just started.[caption id="attachment_530486" align="alignleft" width="280"] Lester B. Pearson[/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.