Marion Dewar by Deborah Gorham

Author:Deborah Gorham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2016-09-13T20:29:23+00:00

Mayor Dewar with two young hockey players. Dewar cared about peace and women’s issues, about “thinking globally and acting locally,” but she loved meeting with a wide variety of local people, as this photo illustrates.

On the other end of the line was a woman who lived in public housing and who could not pay her gas bill. What did Dewar do? She sent her driver over to the woman’s house with a cheque. Echenberg was upset: “Your Worship, you can’t help people like that. It doesn’t work. There are people who wait days and weeks to get a phone call from you. Lots of people were ahead of her.” Dewar’s retort was, “Well, I can’t help everyone. I helped her.”

But Echenberg loved working for the mayor. “With Marion, every day was a fabulous day…. She really was quite remarkably optimistic and energetic.” Moreover, Echenberg remarked, she surrounded herself with strong people. She knew that it was important to have people who could say, “You can’t do this.”

From the time she took office as mayor in 1978 until she stepped down in 1985, Marion Dewar accomplished much, both locally and on the national and international levels. Her commitment to human rights led her to advocate for women, for gays and lesbians, and for First Nations people.126 She supported peace and disarmament and advocated for openness, multiculturalism, and inclusiveness at the local, national, and international levels.

As mayor she intended to reshape Ottawa’s local government. She combated endemic nepotism and she was successful in achieving considerable municipal reform. She improved local policing and she made sure the snow got cleared away. As mayor of Canada’s capital, Dewar worked hard to forge alliances and at the same time to resist pressure from the federal government.

As a local politician committed to urban reform, Marion Dewar was not alone. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s municipal reform was in the air in urban North America. In other Canadian cities, reforming politicians confronted developers and opposed graft and nepotism. In 1971, Toronto’s urban reformers famously succeeded in stopping the Spadina Expressway. (Toronto reformers were not successful when they opposed Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s “megacity” in 1998.) There were referenda on peace, not only in Ottawa, but, for example, in Vancouver. However, there were several things that were unique about Marion Dewar. She was the only woman mayor of a large Canadian urban area. Moreover, she was not only a woman, she was a feminist. (Charlotte Hazel McCallion was elected mayor of Mississauga in 1978, but Mississauga was not then an urban area, and McCallion was not a feminist.)

In terms of his ideas and his actions, Toronto urban reformer John Sewell provides a revealing contrast to Dewar. In Up Against City Hall, Sewell writes about his fight for municipal reform when he ran for alderman in 1969. His campaign literature stated, “There is a new kind of politics emerging in Canadian cities. It is concerned with changing the way decisions are being made, so that people directly affected

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