The story of Mayor William H. Howland
William H. Howland was the son of Canada’s first minister of inland revenue. By 1869 he was 25 and had taken over his father’s grain and milling business, and also led a dozen other companies. In 1871 he became the youngest insurance company president in Canada. He was elected president of the Toronto Board of Trade 1874–75 when he was 30. (Two years earlier he’d married Laura Chipman and they eventually had six children.)
His spiritual fervour reached a new level at age 32 – he felt convicted by a wall plaque in England that read, “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, thou art mine” (Isaiah 43:1).
Returning to Toronto, he was led into evangelical Anglicanism and the Temperance Movement by his pastor W. S. Rainsford at St. James Cathedral. He lived out his faith working with Hillcrest Convalescent Hospital, the YMCA, Haven Home for Unwed Mothers, Prisoners’ Aid Association, Central Prison Mission School and the Toronto General Hospital.
He visited Toronto slums on many nights, sometime neglecting his business interests to go from house to house and reach out to poor, sick and alcoholic people. He also purchased 50 acres to start an industrial school for youth. In 1877 he contributed to the founding of what became Wycliffe College. Frustration with some Anglican leaders led him to help found the nondenominational Toronto Mission Union, which operated seniors’ and convalescent homes, and Toronto’s first home nursing service.
His community work and business connections contributed to his election in 1885 as the city’s 25th mayor with a mandate to clean up the city, including from some 2,000 property-owning women for whom municipal voting had been legalized just the year before. He was 42 years old. His first campaign coined the memorable motto Toronto the Good.
With the backing of the Municipal Reform Association involving union leaders, poverty activists and prohibitionists, he campaigned for morality, faith and reform. Toronto then had a population of 104,000 and about 800 saloons. Over 50% of crime was related to drunkenness.
He began as mayor by installing a 21-foot banner quoting Psalm 127 on the office wall: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” He pledged Toronto would be “an honourable city, a God-fearing city,” that he “would rather see it thus than the greatest and richest city in the continent.” Even as mayor, he personally fed people living in poverty and prayed over sick people.
Garbage collection was basically nonexistent, and with no general sewage system Toronto lived on the verge of a typhoid epidemic. Children swam in a harbour area where raw sewage from ditches flowed in. Toronto’s fresh water supply was sucked through leaking, rotten wooden pipes, half buried in the sewage and sludge of the harbour.
Howland shocked bureaucrats by enforcing a bylaw which forbade the depositing of garbage within the city limits. After he threatened to send the city commissioner to jail for breaking this bylaw, garbage miraculously began to be collected. Howland also contributed to the construction of a trunk sewer system to redirect sewage away from the harbour. After a political struggle he also managed to reduce the number of liquor licences. His attempts to reduce crime didn’t all succeed, but they drew other mayors to visit, hoping to learn from the successes.
During his reelection campaign in 1887, all the taxi cabs were paid off by his opponent so they would refuse to take Howland’s supporters to the polls. Newly enfranchised women voters raised their petticoats and trekked through the snow anyway. At his reelection more than 3,000 supporters at the YMCA hall burst into singing “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”
He didn’t seek a third term, moving on to become founding Canadian president in 1889 of what became the Christian & Missionary Alliance. In those days its congregations only met on Sunday afternoons. So he was Anglican on Sunday morning and Alliance on Sunday afternoon.
When he died unexpectedly in 1893 of double pneumonia at age 49, his funeral procession was the largest Toronto had ever had.
Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird of Surrey, B.C., are co-authors of God’s Firestarters: Preparing Our Families for Coming Revivals (HIS Publishing, 2021). Read more columns at FaithToday.ca/HistoryLesson.