Susan Fish

Susan Fish (March 21, 1945—) is a former Canadian politician. She served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1981 to 1987, and was a cabinet minister in the governments of Bill Davis and Frank Miller.

Fish was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and raised in New York City. She was educated at St. Lawrence College and New York University. She moved to Toronto as an adult and worked on the staff of David Crombie, the pro-reform Mayor of Toronto. Fish was elected to Toronto City Council as a reform alderman in 1976, and served until 1981.

Like Crombie, she was a Red Tory. She ran for Bill Davis' Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in the 1981 Ontario election and was elected as Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for the St. George constituency in downtown Toronto. Shortly after her election, she participated in a rally at Queen's Park to support the inclusion of sexual identity in the Ontario Human Rights Code. [ [http://www.web.net/~clgro/history.htm Way to Go CLGRO 1975 - 2000: A Short History] ]

On July 6, 1983, she was promoted to the Davis cabinet as Minister of Citizenship and Culture. She supported her friend Larry Grossman in his unsuccessful bid to succeed Davis in 1985, and was dropped from Cabinet on February 8 of that year after right-winger Frank Miller was elected Tory leader in the January 1985 leadership convention.

Fish was re-elected with a reduced plurality in the 1985 election and was brought back into government on May 17, 1985 as Minister of the Environment in Miller's short-lived minority government. After the Tories were defeated by a motion of non-confidence in June 1985, she continued to serve in the legislature as an opposition MPP. She was defeated in the 1987 Ontario election by Liberal Attorney-General Ian Scott, by a margin of 8,055 votes in the redistributed constituency of St. George—St. David.

She returned to politics in 1991, when she ran for Mayor of Toronto against Jack Layton, June Rowlands and Betty Disero. Fearing a Layton victory, the business and development community consolidated its support and funding behind Rowlands as the "Anybody but Layton" candidate, forcing Disero and Fish to drop out of the race due to lack of resources.

She currently serves on the Ontario Municipal Board, on the board of Harbourfront Corp., the Metro Action Committee on Public Violence Against Women and Children, and Casey House.

ee also

*Toronto municipal election, 1991

References