ELLIOTT, Robert Ellsworth

Robert Ellsworth Elliott carried Hamilton East for the Progressive Conservatives through eleven cumulative years in the Ontario Legislature, split across the 1948 CCF surge that briefly pushed him out and the 1951 recovery that returned him three years later. He came to provincial politics from the Hamilton building trade, a general contractor with ten inter-war years in the Royal Canadian Engineers behind him and eleven years as an alderman on the city council.

Early life and military service

Elliott was born at Allenwood, Ontario, a small community in Simcoe County south of Georgian Bay, on 19 January 1901. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Engineers in 1918, at the close of the First World War, and continued with the engineers through the inter-war period. He served until 1928, accumulating ten years with the regiment.

After leaving the engineers, he settled in Hamilton and established himself as a general contractor. In 1926 he married Edith May Homan; the couple had two children.

Hamilton City Council

Elliott sat as alderman on Hamilton City Council from 1934 to 1945, eleven consecutive years that ran through the Depression and the Second World War. The council seat brought him into the Progressive Conservative riding association for Hamilton East and positioned him for a run at the provincial seat once the war ended.

Ontario Legislature, first term

In the 1945 Ontario general election, held on 4 June under Premier George Drew, Elliott carried Hamilton East for the Progressive Conservatives, defeating the CCF incumbent William Herbert Connor by 2,945 votes. He sat through the 22nd Parliament of Ontario. The 1948 election reversed that result: the CCF surged province-wide, growing its caucus from eight seats to twenty-one and taking over as Official Opposition, and the swing carried both Hamilton East and neighbouring Hamilton Centre out of Progressive Conservative hands. Elliott lost his seat to the CCF’s John Lawrence Dowling after one term.

Second term and committee work

Elliott recaptured Hamilton East from Dowling at the general election of 22 November 1951, under Premier Leslie Frost, and held it again in the 1955 election, an eight-year stretch through the 24th and 25th Parliaments. Over his three sessions in the House he sat on a long run of standing committees, including Labour, Public Accounts, Mining, Game and Fish, Lands and Forests, Health, Highway Safety, Private Bills, Standing Orders, Travel and Publicity, Conservation, Municipal Law, and Privileges and Elections, and from 1955 to 1957 he served on a select committee examining air pollution and smoke control, a live issue in an industrial riding built around steel manufacturing. He contested the seat again in 1959 and lost it to the CCF’s Norman Davison by 1,072 votes, closing out a cumulative eleven years in the Legislative Assembly.

Later life and death

Elliott retired from Hamilton and moved to Florida in 1968. He spent his last years in Clearwater, where he died on 17 April 1981, at the age of eighty. The Hamilton Spectator carried his obituary three days later.