1994 Brantford municipal election

The 1994 Brantford municipal election was held on November 14, 1994, to elect a mayor, councillors, and school trustees in the city of Brantford, Ontario.

In the mayoral contest, Chris Friel defeated one-term incumbent Bob Taylor.

Results[]

• Bob Lancaster was raised in the small community of Little Lake, Ontario. He was first elected to the Brantford City Council in 1978, winning a seat in the city's second ward. He was re-elected without opposition in 1980 and was returned again in 1982. After standing down in 1985, he returned to council in 1991 and served another term. Lancaster was fifty-four years old in 1994, worked as a realtor, and was seen as a pro-business candidate.^[1] After the 1994 election, he complained to the Ontario Press Council about election coverage in the Brantford Expositor. The case was dismissed.^[2] He later chaired both the Brantford police services board and the Brant and Brantford Housing Authority as a citizen appointee.^[3] His nephew Stephen Lancaster has also been a councillor.^[4]

• Robert E. Smith (died November 15, 2009) was a veterinarian. He graduated from the Ontario Veterinary College (later a part of the University of Guelph) in 1956 and operated a hospital practice in Indianapolis, Indiana, until 1975. He later moved to Brantford and opened a new practice in 1978. He became a founding member of the and retired in 2002.^[5] Smith served one year on the Brantford city council after defeating incumbent councillor Charles Bowen for the second position in the city's fifth ward in 1991.^[6] He was narrowly defeated by Marguerite Ceschi-Smith in 1994. A decade later, he wrote public letters calling for increased protection for the elderly, for the dismissal of Brantford's highest-paid municipal staff, and against granting legal status for religious arbitration in Ontario.^[7] He died in 2009, at age seventy-seven, after a farming accident.^[8]

Source: Brantford Expositor, 15 November 1994, p. 7.

References[]