THOMPSON, Joseph Elijah

Joseph Elijah Thompson rose through Toronto City Hall as a clerk, built an insurance brokerage, took a captain’s commission with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and sat in the Ontario Legislature for a decade. He held the Speaker’s chair at Queen’s Park from 1924 to 1926, chaired the 1920 Ontario Conservative leadership convention that chose Howard Ferguson, and spent his final working years as registrar of Toronto’s surrogate court.

Early life

Thompson was born in Toronto on 19 July 1867 and grew up in Cabbagetown, the working-class district east of Parliament Street. He was educated at Dufferin School and Jarvis Collegiate Institute. At seventeen he took his first job as a clerk in a dry goods store, and his first regular employment in the civic administration came in 1889, as a clerk in the City of Toronto Treasurer’s office.

He stayed there nearly two decades and was appointed the city's Commissioner of Industry and Publicity in 1907, a new office charged with promoting Toronto as a manufacturing centre. He left the role in 1908 to open his own insurance brokerage. In 1898 he had married Ida M. Wilkinson.

Orange Order

Thompson joined Medcalf L.O.L. No. 781, named for Francis Henry Medcalf, the Irish-born foundryman who had served as Toronto’s first County Master. Thompson himself was elected County Master of Toronto for 1907 and 1908, coincident with his years heading the city’s publicity office. The appointment to County Master placed him at the head of the largest Orange jurisdiction in Canada and established the political base he would draw on a decade later.

City Hall and war service

His first elected office came in 1915, when he won one of the three seats on Toronto’s Board of Control, the body that then shared executive authority with the mayor, polling 16,505 votes. He was re-elected as an incumbent controller in 1916 with 18,209 votes. He gave up the seat in 1917, retiring from the Board to volunteer for the Canadian Expeditionary Force and take a captain’s commission; William Henry Shaw was chosen to fill the vacancy he left. His CEF service carried him through the last year of the fighting and into the post-Armistice Allied garrison in occupied Germany. Discharged in 1919, he came back to Toronto and picked up his brokerage and his civic career where he had left them.

Provincial politics

Thompson contested the 1919 provincial election in Toronto Northeast and took the seat for the Conservatives.

The party as a whole lost that contest to the United Farmers of Ontario under E. C. Drury, but Thompson arrived at Queen's Park with a safe urban riding and enough caucus standing that when the Legislature opened in March 1920 he was named Conservative Party whip. From that chair he presided over the Ontario Conservatives' 1920 leadership convention, which chose Howard Ferguson.

A second election in 1923 returned him to the same seat, the year Ferguson carried the party back to government. On 6 February 1924 the House chose him Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. He held the Speaker’s chair through two sessions, stepping down on 8 April 1926. The Conservatives then ran him in the riding of St. David, in east-central downtown Toronto; he won it by a wide margin. He chose not to stand again in the 1929 campaign and left provincial politics after a decade in the House.

Later life

Out of the legislature after 1929, Thompson was appointed registrar of the Surrogate Court of Toronto. He lost the appointment in 1934 and returned to the insurance business he had built two decades earlier. He made one further bid for public office, running unsuccessfully for Toronto City Council in 1939.

Death

Thompson died in Toronto on 16 March 1941, at the age of seventy-three.