Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, his shaky minority government on the ropes, appointed George Nowlan of Nova Scotia as his new Minister of Finance on this date in 1962. Earlier, the finance minister who had held office under Dief, Donald S. Fleming, chose not to run in the 1962 election, requiring the PM to find a replacement.
There was plenty of tension between Dief and Nowlan throughout the Diefenbaker Years and this helped spark the cabinet crisis of early 1963 that proved to be Prime Minster Diefenbaker’s undoing. Nowlan’s tenure at the Department of Finance was therefore brief as Canada’s Tories would be replaced by Lester Pearson’s Liberals in April 1963.Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon.
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