William Donald Dennison was a Canadian social-democratic politician that served in both the Ontario Legislative Assembly and finally as the City of Toronto's mayor. He served two nonconsecutive terms as a Member of Provincial Parliament in the 1940s and early 1950s. After his provincial-level career, he focused on Toronto's municipal politics, holding offices as an alderman, member of the Toronto Board of Control, and finally as the city's mayor. He was the mayor from 1967 to 1972, winning two consecutive three-year terms. Prior to entering politics, he was a school principal and teacher. As of 2015 he was the last mayor of Toronto to be a member of the Orange Order.
Background
Dennison grew up on a farm in Renfrew County. He first left home at age 15 to work in the lumber camps of Northern Ontario. As a young man he would trek west to Saskatchewan in the summers to earn money helping with the harvest and pitching grain. By night, he would educate himself by reading Little Blue Books. As a child and a young man he stammered so badly where he could not pronounce his own name, although after several failed attempts to correct his stammering, first at a school in Kitchener and later at a school in New York City, he eventually learned how to control and correct the habit himself, opening his own School of Speech Correction.
In 1938, he was elected a school trustee and served three successive one-year terms. In 1941 and 1943 he won election to serve as an alderman on Toronto City Council After a ten-year interlude with his involvement in provincial politics, Dennison returned to Toronto City Council in 1953 serving again as an alderman. In 1958, he was elected to the Toronto Board of Control. On council he interrogated other politicians and officials on conflict of interest, expense accounts, and their relationships with companies doing business with the city. He ran to be Toronto's mayor in 1966, campaigning on providing "a strong voice for labour in city affairs" and opposing the pro-development policies of incumbent Phil Givens. He was elected despite being opposed by all three daily newspapers. He was the first member of the CCF or NDP to serve as mayor of Toronto since James Simpson in 1935, and the last until Barbara Hall. He opposed the early Eaton Centredevelopment plan that would have seen the demolition of Toronto's Old City Hall, Dennison was a pro-labour mayor but later became more conservative in response to early criticism. Serving as mayor during the Canadian Centennial, he urged the organizers of Caribana to make it a recurring event. He generally favoured development and complained about hippies and deserters from the US military flocking to the city saying that "a few hippies and deserters are Toronto's only problem." He decided not to run again for mayor, and due to a prostate operation, watched the 1972 municipal election from a bed at St. Michael's Hospital.
Retirement and death
Dennison and his wife Dorothy had a Christmas tree farm in Caledon East, where they went to get away from the city. He was also a beekeeper, and at one point, had 900,000 bees living in his Jarvis Street home's backyard. During his retirement, the Dennisons would vacation in Florida during the winter months. While vacationing in the United States, a medical emergency arose due to his, Parkinson's disease, and it finally forced him to be evacuated back to Toronto in April 1981. He died at Toronto General Hospital from complications due to Parkinson's Disease on May 2, 1981. Their only child, Lorna Dennison Milne, was a community activist who was eventually appointed to the Senate of Canada, sitting in the Red Chamber as a Liberal from 1995 to 2009.
