GARDHOUSE, William James

William James Gardhouse farmed one hundred and fifty acres in what is now the Islington-Elmhurst-Rexdale district of north Etobicoke, ran the township’s council table for most of two decades in the office his own father had held before him, and broke a thirty-year Conservative hold on the West York riding by winning it for the Liberals in 1934. He lost the seat nine years later to Charles Millard, the CCF candidate who would go on to lead the Canadian steelworkers’ union movement.

Early life

Gardhouse was born on 1 September 1880 at Highfield, a farm crossroads since absorbed into Etobicoke, the son of John Gardhouse and Mary Alice Dickson. He was a great-grandson of the first Gardhouse to settle in the district: another John Gardhouse, who had emigrated from Cumbria, England, in 1837 at the age of fifty-three and taken up land on the west branch of the Humber River, building the family’s Etobicoke farming operations from a single 260-acre grant into a multi-generation dynasty of prize-winning livestock breeders. Gardhouse trained at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. Around 1903 he set up his own stock farm of a hundred and fifty acres at what local historical records place at Islington Avenue and Elmhurst Drive, near today’s Rexdale Boulevard. In 1905 he married Alice Garbutt. The farmhouse he built survives, on a subdivided lot, at 105 Elmhurst Drive. He ran the operation for over four decades before handing it down to his son Arnold in the mid-1940s. Arnold sold the land in 1952, and it was redeveloped as north-Etobicoke suburbia.

Orange Order

His lodge affiliation was with Parkhill, a rural lodge that drew its members from the farming townships west of Toronto. Ontario Orangeism had held that rural Protestant constituency since the mid-19th century. The lodge was not a formal political organization, but its web of farming families and country meetings sat underneath the riding-level network Gardhouse would later draw on when he ran for Queen’s Park.

Local government

His township career opened with a seat on Etobicoke council in 1916. He held it again the following year, moved up to Deputy Reeve for the 1918-through-1920 sessions, and then sat as Reeve from 1921 to 1924, an office his own father, John Gardhouse, had held before him in 1908 and again from 1910 to 1912. A concurrent seat on York County Council ran seven years and culminated in his election as County Warden in 1924, the senior office in Ontario’s two-tier county system.

After a three-year gap, he returned as Deputy Reeve in 1927 and served in that office for four consecutive years. In 1932 and 1933 he again sat as Reeve of Etobicoke. The total, twelve-plus years of senior township office and a county wardenship, made him the most experienced municipal politician in the riding by the time he stood for the Legislature.

Provincial politics

Gardhouse contested West York in the 1934 general election as a Liberal, after an unsuccessful run in 1932. No Liberal had carried the riding in over thirty years. Mitchell Hepburn’s provincial sweep that June allowed him to take it, defeating the sitting member Henry Isaac Price. Gardhouse held the seat through a second term after the 1937 election. He served in the Legislative Assembly until 30 June 1943, when his term ended in the general election of 4 August 1943, a province-wide breakthrough for the CCF under Ted Jolliffe that took the party from a handful of seats to thirty-four and Official Opposition status. West York fell to the CCF’s Charles Millard, the founding president of United Auto Workers Local 222 who had led the Oshawa General Motors workers out on strike in 1937; the same year he unseated Gardhouse, Millard became the first National Director of the United Steelworkers of America in Canada, a post he held until 1956.

Later life and death

Gardhouse joined the Toronto and York Roads Commission in 1942 and served eight years. He suffered a heart attack in 1947 and never fully recovered. He died on 6 October 1950 at the age of seventy.