A Biography of Robert Henry Winters

Nicole O'Byrne speaks with Barry Cahill about his book, A Biography of Robert Henry Winters. This biography is of Nova Scotian Robert Henry Winters (1910-1969) who was first elected to Parliament in 1945 and appointed to Cabinet by Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent in 1948. Between 1957 and 1965 Winters was one of Canada’s most prominent businessmen, running companies specializing in resource extraction and development. Returning to politics in 1965, he was again elected to Parliament and soon joined the Cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson as minister of trade and commerce. Notably, Winters placed second to Pierre Trudeau in the vote to choose the new leader of Canada’s Liberal Party in 1968. Leaving politics once again and re-entering big business, Winters became president, and then chair of Brascan (now Brookfield Asset Management) before his unexpected death. This book will be a welcome read for anyone interested in Canadian politics, especially within the Liberal Party, Canadian business, and the interaction between the two.

Barry Cahill, MLitt is an independent historian in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in the legal profession, the 1917 Halifax Disaster, Canadian Black Studies, especially slavery and abolition, and Canadian political biography. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University, and has published eight books and numerous scholarly articles, including several in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and is currently working on a biography of William Stevens Fielding, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s minister of finance throughout the fifteen years of the Laurier government, 1896-1911.

Image Credit: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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