SHAW, John

John Shaw was Mayor of Toronto from 6 August 1897 until January 1900, elected to the office by city council and then by the voters in the two elections that followed. He presided over the completion of Edward James Lennox’s new City Hall at Queen and Bay, the Romanesque Revival building that now serves as Old City Hall, and opened it formally in September 1899. He later returned to municipal office on the Board of Control and closed his career with a term in the Ontario Legislature.

Early life and law

Born in Toronto in 1837, Shaw took his early education at Upper Canada College and his university at Victoria College.

He read law in the Toronto office of Patterson and Harris and took his call to the Upper Canada bar in 1870. His practice and his residence were both in Yorkville, the village along Bloor Street West that was then independent of the City of Toronto.

Orange Order

Shaw’s lodge affiliation was with McKinley L.O.L. No. 275, the Toronto lodge that also carried the names of Francis Henry Medcalf (earlier) and Charles Philip Fenwick (later).

Marriage and family

Shaw married Elizabeth Sleeth. They had at least one daughter, Mabelle E. Luelling Shaw, born in 1884, who married Charles William Craine on 22 September 1906.

Yorkville annexation and city council

Yorkville was annexed by Toronto in 1883. In the first post-annexation municipal election that December, Shaw won the aldermanic seat for St. Paul’s Ward, the new ward that covered the former village. He held it through the ward-boundary redrawing of 1891, after which he continued on council as alderman for Ward 3 until 1895.

Mayor of Toronto

Shaw first stood for mayor in 1896. Robert J. Fleming defeated him. When Fleming resigned in August 1897 to take up the city’s assessment commissioner post, council elected Shaw to finish the term. The voters returned him directly in the January 1898 and January 1899 elections, both times against Ernest Albert Macdonald, who won the seat himself in the election that followed and succeeded Shaw as mayor for the 1900 term.

The defining event of Shaw’s tenure was the formal opening of the new City Hall on 18 September 1899.

Lennox, himself a Toronto Orangeman, had been working on the Romanesque Revival building since 1889. Shaw and his wife were lifted in a workman's cradle to the top of the clock tower during the opening ceremonies. Under Shaw's administration, the city also created the Toronto and Hudson's Bay Railway Commission to examine a northern rail extension that was not, in the end, built.

Return to council, then the Legislature

Shaw stepped out of politics after his third mayoral term ended at the start of 1900. He returned to Toronto City Hall four years later, though not on his first attempt: in 1904, the first year the newly created Board of Control was directly elected by voters rather than drawn from council, Shaw stood for a seat and lost. He won a by-election to the Board a few months afterward, and voters returned him in the 1905 and 1906 elections, giving him three years on the city’s senior executive committee.

In the 1908 Ontario general election he was elected to the Legislative Assembly for the Toronto North riding’s Seat B as a Conservative, serving from 8 June 1908 through the 12th Parliament. He sat on the standing committees on Municipal Law, Private Bills, and Railways in each of his three sessions, 1909 through 1911. He did not seek re-election when his term ended on 13 November 1911.

Death

Shaw died in Toronto on 7 November 1917.