Sarnia Semper: Mike Bradley’s 41 years in public life

Mike Bradley entered Sarnia politics in 1985, became the city’s youngest mayor three years later and remained in the mayor’s chair for 38 years. After Sarnia voters chose a new mayor Monday, The Journal looks back at 41 years of public service and a city transformed around him.

For the first time in 38 years, Sarnia voters chose someone other than Mike Bradley for mayor Monday.

Carrie McEachran received 13,828 votes to Bradley’s 7,185, ending an unbroken run in the mayor’s office that began in 1988. Bradley had won 11 consecutive mayoral elections after first being elected to Sarnia council three years earlier.

Bradley offered little public reflection on the result that night. In a brief statement posted after the election, he congratulated McEachran and the incoming council before signing off with two words that have long reflected his attachment to the community: “Sarnia Semper”, pairing the city’s name with the Latin word for “always.”

The result brought to an end one of the longest careers in Ontario municipal politics. Bradley spent 41 years in elected office in Sarnia, 38 of them as mayor, serving through amalgamation, industrial restructuring, economic diversification and profound changes in the city’s relationship with neighbouring Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Along the way he became closely associated with causes ranging from occupational disease and disability employment to open government, economic development and the defence of Sarnia’s industrial economy.

Bradley entered elected politics in 1985 after several years working as executive assistant to Sarnia-Lambton Liberal MP Bud Cullen. He had already made one attempt at elected office by then, running federally as the Liberal candidate in 1984 and losing to Progressive Conservative Ken James. The following year he won a seat as a Sarnia alderman.

When Mayor Marceil Saddy died in office in 1988, council appointed Ron Gordon as interim mayor. Bradley contested the fall election against three experienced candidates and won. At 33, he became the youngest mayor in Sarnia’s history.

His first years in the job coincided with enormous change. Bradley was not yet committed to municipal politics for life: while already serving as mayor, he ran as the Ontario Liberal candidate in the 1990 provincial election. He finished second to New Democrat Bob Huget during the election that brought Bob Rae’s NDP to power.

Had that election gone differently, Bradley’s mayoralty might have become a relatively short stop on the way to Queen’s Park. Instead, Sarnia City Hall became his political home.

Sarnia and the neighbouring Town of Clearwater were amalgamated on Jan. 1, 1991, making Bradley the first mayor of Sarnia-Clearwater and the first Sarnia mayor in more than seven decades to sit on Lambton County council. By June 2000, he had already become the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.

Amalgamation was not Bradley’s project alone. The boundary debate long predated his mayoralty and had been championed by Saddy and others. But Bradley inherited responsibility for governing the newly combined municipality at almost exactly the same time its economic foundations were being shaken.

Sarnia-Lambton’s petrochemical sector had generated generations of well-paid industrial employment, but restructuring and plant closures hit the region hard around the beginning of the 1990s. Bradley later told a Queen’s Park committee that Sarnia-Lambton lost more than 6,000 jobs during that period.

The response became one of the defining themes of his career. Business, labour, municipal government, Lambton College and community leaders increasingly worked through common economic-development institutions rather than waiting for senior governments to replace the jobs that had disappeared.

The Sarnia-Lambton Council for Economic Renewal emerged from that period and later evolved into the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership. Bradley served three terms as chair of the local economic-development commission and remained involved with the Economic Partnership for decades. His broader public service also included leadership roles with Ontario’s large-city mayors and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, service on the Lambton College board, more than three decades on the police board and later the chairmanship of the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park.

Bradley’s economic politics throughout those years were rooted in a difficult balancing act. He was an aggressive defender of Sarnia’s traditional industrial economy, but he also spent much of his career arguing that the community could not depend indefinitely on the same industries and technologies that had built Chemical Valley.

That outlook became especially visible with the creation of the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park in 2003. The City of Sarnia, County of Lambton and Western University established the park in the former Dow Chemical corporate centre as a base for research, commercialization and new industrial technologies. Bradley became its longtime board chair.

He did not claim sole ownership of that transition. When longtime Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership leader George Mallay retired, Bradley credited Mallay as the driving political force behind the Research Park and as an early champion of biofuels and alternative energy.

That willingness to work through coalitions became an important feature of the Bradley era. Economic development was rarely the work of the mayor or city council alone. SLEP, Lambton County, Western, Lambton College, industry, labour and senior governments all played substantial roles. Bradley’s contribution was often to use the office of mayor as a platform to advocate relentlessly for the broader strategy.

The importance of diversification became even clearer in 2006, when Dow announced it would end its remaining manufacturing operations in Sarnia. By then, one of the buildings associated with Sarnia’s old industrial economy had already been repurposed as a Research Park intended to help create whatever came next.

While industrial development dominated much of Sarnia’s public life, some of Bradley’s strongest advocacy centred on people who had already paid a heavy price for that industrial history.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, workers, widows, unions, researchers and occupational-health advocates had forced growing public recognition of cancers and other diseases linked to workplace exposure to asbestos and hazardous substances in Sarnia.

Bradley became one of their most consistent political allies. A peer-reviewed study of Sarnia’s occupational-disease movement later concluded that, among local politicians, Bradley “took the lead” in raising awareness and supporting victims. The study credited workers, unions and community organizations with driving the broader campaign, while identifying Bradley as an important political supporter.

In 2001, Sarnia council called on Ottawa and Quebec to stop the use and export of asbestos. Researchers examining Sarnia’s occupational-disease movement identified Sarnia as the first Canadian city to formally make that demand to the federal government. Council reaffirmed the position in 2008 and again in 2011, while Bradley continued pressing for stronger action well into the following decade.

For a mayor who spent so much of his career defending Chemical Valley and industrial employment, the issue could have been politically uncomfortable. Instead, Bradley’s position was that support for industry did not require ignoring the people harmed by it.

That balance, defence of industrial jobs alongside recognition of their human and environmental costs, became an increasingly important part of Sarnia’s politics.

Another issue became even more closely associated with him personally.

In January 2010, Bradley launched what became known as the Mayor’s Challenge to Hire Persons with a Disability, urging other mayors and employers to move beyond general commitments to accessibility and actually employ people with disabilities.

Bradley argued that while mayors did not personally control municipal hiring, they could create expectations within their organizations and communities. He travelled, contacted other mayors and worked with then-lieutenant-governor David Onley to promote the campaign.

Sarnia also worked to lead by example. By 2012, the city had hired at least one employee with a disability in every municipal department, turning the challenge into more than a symbolic advocacy campaign.

Bradley received a Corporate Social Responsibility Award from the Human Resources Professionals Association and Canadian HR Reporter for the work, and the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy later identified him as one of its accessibility champions and credited him as the originator of the Mayor’s Challenge.

In 2014, Onley personally presented Bradley with the Lieutenant Governor’s Community Volunteer Award in recognition of his contributions to Ontario. Bradley also received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals for community service.

The disability-employment campaign fit a broader pattern in which Bradley repeatedly used the visibility of the mayor’s office to attach himself to causes beyond routine municipal responsibilities. He fought reductions to VIA Rail service, including on accessibility grounds, and remained a strong supporter of veterans and remembrance.

One of those contributions remains physically visible in the city. In 1998, following a proposal from Bradley, council renamed Victoria Park as Veterans Park in recognition of the site’s military history and those who had served. The new name officially took effect on Remembrance Day.

Bradley also became unusually recognizable for the mayor of a city Sarnia’s size. He was a frequent radio and television commentator, appeared in Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine and became known beyond politics for his enthusiasm for Bruce Springsteen, contributing to two books about the musician in 2007 and 2009.

For decades, Sarnians knew not only Bradley’s politics but the public personality that went with them: the suits, rapid-fire interviews, Springsteen references, blunt opinions, constant letters to ministers and premiers, and his willingness to take local issues far beyond City Hall.

That tendency emerged early. During the 1991 cross-border shopping crisis, Bradley was already at Queen’s Park arguing that tax differences and provincial policy were harming border communities. In 2006, he became a prominent Canadian critic of U.S. Coast Guard plans for live-fire training zones on the Great Lakes. Decades later he would take the same approach to Line 5, travelling to Ottawa and pressing governments on both sides of the border over a pipeline he viewed as essential to Sarnia’s industrial economy.

Bradley’s long tenure also overlapped with significant changes in the formal relationship between Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

In 2014, council named Bradley the city’s elected “community champion” for a joint municipal-First Nation infrastructure initiative. The work contributed to renewed service arrangements and a 2017 cooperation protocol between Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang intended to improve communication, information-sharing and planning between the two governments.

Bradley later acknowledged that older agreements had been written in antiquated colonial language and that the City of Sarnia itself had played a role in the historical erosion of Aamjiwnaang territory. When Sarnia adopted a land acknowledgement in 2020, he argued that acknowledging that history meant little unless it was accompanied by a continuing working relationship.

The relationship remained complicated by the enormous environmental burden carried by Aamjiwnaang residents living amid Chemical Valley. During the 2024 benzene crisis, elevated readings forced closures at Aamjiwnaang and prompted the First Nation to push governments and regulators for stronger action. Sarnia council backed Aamjiwnaang’s call for cleaner air, and Bradley said the episode had badly damaged years of progress in environmental and First Nations relations.

No account of Bradley’s career can be complete without the period that created the deepest rupture of his mayoralty.

In 2016, Integrity Commissioner Robert Swayze found that Bradley had repeatedly breached council’s Code of Conduct through his dealings with staff, including public criticism of employees, interference with the city manager’s responsibilities and failures to respect staff in their professional roles. Swayze recommended the maximum 90-day suspension of the mayor’s remuneration.

A separate workplace investigation by lawyer Lauren Bernardi reached more serious conclusions after reviewing more than 70 allegations involving four senior employees. Bernardi found that Bradley had violated the city’s harassment policy and the workplace-harassment provisions of Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act, concluding that he had bullied and harassed the four complainants and created a poisoned work environment.

Bradley disputed significant aspects of the process and maintained that some of the conflict stemmed from his efforts to obtain information and demand accountability. Restrictions were nevertheless placed on his dealings with staff, and the conflict dominated much of the 2014-18 council term.

The period also showed how a political style built around persistence and confrontation could become damaging inside the workplace he led. It appeared entirely capable of ending his career, but voters decided otherwise.

In 2018, Bradley received 16,238 votes, about 65 per cent of the mayoral vote, compared with 7,569 for former councillor Anne Marie Gillis. It was one of the largest raw vote totals of his career and gave him a record tenth term.

The result did not undo the findings or the harm documented in the workplace investigation. But politically, it said something remarkable about Bradley’s relationship with Sarnia. After 30 years as mayor, voters were not choosing an unknown quantity. They had watched his politics, his style, his strengths and his failings for decades and nevertheless returned him decisively.

They did so again in 2022.

Nathan Colquhoun mounted a significant challenge centred on changing the city’s political direction, while Bradley again campaigned largely on experience, fiscal restraint, economic development and growth. Bradley won 12,561 votes to Colquhoun’s 8,608 and began his 11th term.

By then the length of his tenure was difficult to comprehend in ordinary political terms. When Bradley first became mayor in 1988, Brian Mulroney was prime minister, the Soviet Union still existed, Sarnia and Clearwater were separate municipalities and the second Blue Water Bridge had not yet been built.

Someone born during Bradley’s first year as mayor was approaching 40 by the time Sarnia elected his successor.

His later years were not simply ceremonial. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bradley was an active voice in local emergency measures and repeatedly pushed for mandatory masking, at times ahead of Lambton’s broader political consensus.

When Air Canada ended scheduled passenger service at Chris Hadfield Airport, he remained a persistent defender of the airport and continued advocating for ways to restore connectivity throughout his final term.

His defence of Line 5 became one of the largest advocacy efforts of his later career. Appearing before a House of Commons committee in 2021, Bradley stressed that he was not there to represent Enbridge, but Sarnia, its workers and the people whose livelihoods depended on the local industrial economy.

That position flowed directly from the economic philosophy that had developed after the job losses of the early 1990s. Sarnia, in Bradley’s view, needed to diversify and adopt new technologies without casually abandoning the industrial infrastructure, skills and investment that still formed a substantial part of the community’s economic base.

The same themes appeared in his final battles over policing.

Bradley spent more than 35 years on the Sarnia Police Services Board, including lengthy periods as chair, before resigning in 2023. He said the board was making spending decisions without adequate public scrutiny and complained that attempts to raise those issues publicly had led to threats of Code of Conduct complaints. Board chair Paul Wiersma disputed aspects of Bradley’s criticism but acknowledged the extraordinary experience and knowledge he brought to the board.

The dispute over police spending continued after Bradley’s departure from the board and became one of the final major fights of his mayoralty as the service pursued substantial operating increases and plans for a new headquarters estimated at $91.1 million.

There was a certain symmetry in that fight. More than three decades after the Clearwater land inquiry helped establish open government and institutional accountability as recurring themes of Bradley’s politics, he was still arguing about public access to decision-making, municipal spending and how powerful institutions should answer to taxpayers.

Bradley used Ontario’s Strong Mayor powers during the 2026 budget process in an attempt to prevent borrowing tied to the police headquarters proposal. The Office of the Solicitor General and Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing later advised that Strong Mayor powers did not allow him to limit police-board budget increases or veto its estimates.

Bradley’s response was characteristic of the politician Sarnia had watched for four decades: he asked Queen’s Park to change the rules.

Bradley waited until the final hours of nomination day this year before confirming he would seek a 12th term. He campaigned again on experience, fiscal restraint, housing and Sarnia’s industrial future, including continued advocacy for Line 5 and the proposed Northern Shield energy corridor.

This time, voters chose McEachran, who campaigned heavily on collaboration and a different style of leadership.

The change does not settle what Bradley’s 41 years in elected office will ultimately mean to Sarnia. No mayor governs a community alone, and the transformation of Sarnia over four decades belongs to thousands of people, municipal employees and councillors, Aamjiwnaang leaders, workers and unions, volunteers, activists, businesses, economic-development officials, educators, researchers and generations of residents.

His relationship with Sarnia was not uncomplicated. The workplace findings of 2016 remain a serious part of his record, as do political conflicts and decisions that will continue to be debated. A career lasting more than four decades inevitably accumulated both accomplishments and scars.

What is difficult to dispute is the scale of the commitment.

For 41 years, public service was not one chapter of Mike Bradley’s working life. It was most of it.

There are generations of Sarnians who have never known their city with another mayor. For them, “the mayor” and “Mike Bradley” have always been nearly interchangeable terms.

That era has now ended, and another will begin under McEachran. The history of Bradley’s time in office will continue to be debated, as is inevitable for any politician who occupied public life for so long.

Bradley chose only two words to close his election-night statement.

Sarnia Semper.