In the end, Downtown Renewal Group took the Mohawk/Y proposal to city council, asking it to provide a $3.4 million share of the project cost. Once they had secured this commitment, they planned to turn next to the provincial and then the federal government, asking them for the same amount. City council decided to postpone a decision so it could consider an alternative plan which would create a new YM/YWCA, a high-rise condominium overlooking the river, and a soccer court and recreational complex at the end of Colborne Street.
As the Downtown Renewal Group and the University Committee pushed downtown Brantford toward post-secondary education, the mayor began pursuing initiatives of his own. Chris Friel was only twenty-seven when he was first elected — the youngest mayor ever elected in Ontario. He was fresh, good-looking, and had a penchant for striking suits. In his speeches, he could captivate an audience. Sometimes with affection, and sometimes with derision, he was known as The Boy Mayor (one admirer I talked to described him as The Boy Wonder). After he left politics, and made the rounds as a speaker, he entitled one of his speeches “The Confessions of The Boy Mayor.” Friel’s detractors said he was a vain autocrat who did not build consensus, but found ways to out-manoeuvre the councillors he did not agree with. Some described him as obstinate and pig-headed. Others said that this was why he was able to change Brantford.
Before he became mayor, Friel had earned a BA in Political Science from the University of Waterloo. After graduation, he began working on an MA in political economy. When he had to decide the subject of his thesis, he picked the ultimate Brantford topic — the collapse of Massey Ferguson/White Farm. He left before he finished, going to work for the development group that organized the Brant Strategic Plan. Not long afterward, he entered the mayoralty race as an unknown and unexpected candidate. In a city desperate for change, he surprised the pundits and won. When he became mayor he was determined to turn Brantford — and especially its downtown — around. He believed that post-secondary education could play a role in reshaping the city, but he was skeptical of the attempt to establish a private university, worrying that it might negatively affect the city’s relationship with the provincial government.
Fifty kilometres away, there were others who shared Friel’s skepticism about Brantford’s attempt to establish a private university. At Wilfrid Laurier University, a new president, Bob Rosehart, thought that the Brantford attempt to create a private university was intruding on territory that belonged to his new institution. The president was someone who liked to keep busy. At any one time, he juggled as many balls in the air as he could manage. Driving with him was an adventure as he conducted a conversation, drove, talked on his cell phone, and kept track of his text messages. I will not forget an occasion when I breathed an inward sigh of relief when we entered a section of an obscure highway with no connectivity, as this prevented him from trying to do all this at once. On an ordinary morning, one of the things he did to keep busy was read newspapers and news clippings. One of the threads that he was following was the discussion of a private university in Brantford.
Two buildings away, one of the university’s best-known History professors, Terry Copp, was following the same events through his personal connections. Copp gained renown as one of Canada’s best military historians, arguing, in a series of bestselling books, that our accepted views of the Second World War, of D-Day, and of the Normandy invasion, were radically mistaken. But Copp’s interests were broader than military history. When he first came to Laurier, he worked on labour history. Under his tutelage, some of the students he supervised studied Brantford. In the 1970s, he himself visited, and was appalled at the deterioration he saw downtown. It made a riveting impression he did not forget.
In 1997, Copp visited again. On this occasion, he accompanied his wife, Linda Risacher Copp, an artist who was working on a series of paintings entitled A Year on the Grand. While in Brantford, Copp was struck by the talk of a private university downtown and wondered why it couldn’t be a campus of Laurier. Back in Waterloo, he asked Arthur Stephen, the vice-president of Advancement, how he might sell the idea to Laurier’s new president, Bob Rosehart. Stephen told him that the president was already watching the developments in Brantford closely. When the two of them met with Rosehart, the president was open minded. He had not yet earned his nickname, “Bob the Builder,” but he was already intrigued with the possibility that he might expand Laurier’s presence in southern Ontario.
Rosehart invited Copp to investigate the situation further. He contacted one of his former students, Robert Campbell, who taught high school in Brantford. Campbell took Copp to meet Brantford’s new mayor.2 Friel was delighted with the suggestion that Laurier establish a campus in Brantford and immediately committed himself to doing what it would take to make it happen. When Copp reported back to the president, Rosehart called the mayor and took a delegation to meet with Friel and the two councillors on the city’s Post-Secondary Education Committee (Mike Hancock and Vince Bucci).3 When they came to Brantford, the Laurier contingent was given a tour of the empty Icomm Centre, which was proposed as a site for a new Laurier campus. Rosehart went back to Waterloo impressed with the building, thinking that the Brantford idea was an idea worth pursuing.
Rosehart has always said that he saw his work at Brantford as a continuation of his work at Lakehead University. In Thunder Bay, a small city in Northern Ontario, he enjoyed the close-knit community, the chance to be a central “mover and shaker,” and the opportunity to represent the city and the whole northern hinterland to the world beyond. In southern Ontario, he found a “new Northern Ontario” in Brantford. He was soon immersed in Brantford goings-on and was brainstorming with the mayor and the city about the possibility of a Laurier campus. As an engineer by trade, he wanted new buildings to be the cornerstone of any new developments. In Brantford, he wanted a new campus on a greenfield site, but warmed to the idea that Laurier might establish itself in the Icomm building. He did not like the layout but was impressed with the new construction and the electrical engineering in a building that had been built to serve as a state-of-the-art telecommunications centre.
The Icomm Building after it was turned into the Brantford Charity Casino. The community debated whether the building should be used for the casino or the university. Though city council decided in favour of the casino, the decision spurred the development of the university, which the city helped fund with its portion of the casino profits.
To move the project along, Rosehart drafted a tentative agreement with the city. It proposed a ten-year lease of the Icomm building at a price of one dollar a year, with Laurier gradually taking over the building’s operating costs. To cover capital renovations, the university and the city would apply to the federal government’s Community Futures Program. Rosehart himself would approach the provincial ministry for funding to cover Brantford students. A Laurier Advisory Board would steer the development of academic programs and the university would hire a senior administrator from the university as “principal dean” of the new campus.
By the first months of 1998, a flurry of activity, much discussion and debate, and some intrigue consumed Brantford as three distinct post-secondary proposals vied for the right to its downtown. For those in the know, a little epic with a pantheon of colourful characters was well underway. Piloted by someone who had worked in the Kalahari and reinforced by Waterloo’s renegade arts professors, the University Committee was attempting to establish a private university in the Carnegie Building. A different coalition of citizens and leaders who made up the Downtown Renewal Group were committed to a plan that would put Mohawk College and the YM/YWCA into the empty shopping mall. A short distance away, Brantford’s “Boy Mayor” and “Bob the Builder” were, on the fringes of downtown, aiming to claim the Icomm Centre in the name of Laurier.
This was a heady moment for a downtown to which everyone had turned a blind eye for so long. Three different post-secondary groups were actively pursuing a location in the old downtown. And yet, for all of this, in the midst of so much activity and
