Jim Bradley Was &  Remains The Best Environment Minister This Province And Country Have Ever Had

(A Few Highlights from the early years in the political journey of one of Niagara’s best known and longest serving  public figures, the late Jim Bradley)

A Tribute to Jim Bradley by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large reporter/publisher and a former environment reporter with The St. Catharines Standard when it was an independent, locally-owned newspaper

Posted October 2nd, 2025 on Niagara At Large

One of my earliest memories of Jim Bradley was of him showing up late – something he very rarely ever did during all of his 55 years in municipal and provincial office –  for an event of some significance to a good number of people in the Niagara’s northeast end.

It was 1983 and the event, hosted by Ontario’s then Conservative government and Niagara’s regional government, featured the opening of a brand new, multi-million-dollar  pipeline that would deliver drinking water from St. Catharines to the Town of Niagara-one-the-Lake where people were concerned about the safety of water they were drawing from the mouth of a Niagara River polluted at the time with toxic chemicals leaking from the Love Canal and other notorious dumpsites located on and  near the river’s American shore.

The grand opening of the pipeline was held in a remote place off Niagara Stone Road that wasn’t all that easy for many, including this reporter, to find and by the time Jim Bradley, the Liberal MPP for St. Catharines, found it, the proceedings were over and everyone in attendance was packing up to leave.

I still remember Jim getting out of his car and rushing up to what few members of the media were still there and asking if we would stay a few more moments to hear what he had to say about all of this.

Of course we would was our reply before he went on to stress that spending millions of dollars to pipe water to a community from some distance away because that community’s source of water was in danger of being polluted or was already polluted to a point where people didn’t want to drink it is nothing to celebrate.

This pipeline is a “monument” to our failure to keep our rivers and lakes clean, he said, before ending with his hope his hope that that the people of Niagara-on-the-Lake would not stop pressing governments on both sides of the border to reduce the flow of pollution to the Niagara River.

Then, just as Jim Bradley wrapped up and was ready to go, members of a news team from CHCH TV in Hamilton, who had also lost their way to the site, showed up and asked him if he wouldn’t mind repeating what he had to say and taking hold of the big steel key used for opening the pipeline so that they would have a visual for their news cast that evening.

As I watched this, it was hard not to chuckle at the thought of representatives from the province’s Conservative and Niagara’s regional governments, who had no doubt worked so hard to stage the opening ceremonies for the pipeline to their political advantage, turning on the news that night and seeing this young MPP from the province’s opposition Liberal Party appearing to turn that key after making his case that there was no reason to celebrate.

Five years later, Jim Bradley was serving as Ontario’s Minister of Environment for then Premier David Peterson’s Liberal government and he was the one hosting the opening of a new water line from the Niagara municipality of Grimsby to the West Lincoln town of Smithville where the local well water was in danger of being poisoned with PCBs from a nearby toxic waste site.

‘Okay,’ I thought as I waited for him to approach the podium. ‘This time he is the government. What is he going to say?’

With a rather solemn look on his face, these were his words –

“I’m glad the people of Smithville finally have a secure water supply, but pipelines constructed to bring water from distant places because the local water supply is in danger of being contaminated are monuments to failure of government to protect the public from (toxic chemicals like) PCBs.”

Everyone from the mayor of West Lincoln to whoever was the Niagara regional chair at the time had a look on their face like they couldn’t believe that a politician from a governing party would not take advantage of a time like this to do a little bragging about all the money they spent on some infrastructure for the community – especially when it was something like this that delivered safer water to the people living there.

So much for cuing the balloons.

By then, I had been working as an environment reporter for The St. Catharines Standard for close to nine years and I had grown used to Jim Bradley opting for the road less travelled when he believed it would lead to greater good for people in the community at large for him to do so.

One of his finest hours in this regard came shortly after he was appointed the province’s Environment Minister in 1985 when he found out through reporting that I and a fellow journalist from The Buffalo News had done that a “draft agreement” for addressing pollution in the Niagara River, negotiated between senor officials for the federal governments in Canadian and the United States, and New York State and the ministry he was now in charge of, contained no targets or deadlines for reducing the concentrations of chemical poisons in the waterway.

I called Bradley for a response to this and remarkably he had not yet been shown it by the bureaucrats in his own ministry. He asked if I would bring him the copy I had obtained from a source in Environment Canada so that he could look it over before responding.

He read through it, sat quietly for a moment, then said; “I can’t sign this.”

When those words made the news , they infuriated his counterparts in the other agencies who had been overseeing the negotiations of this so-called cleanup agreement long before Jim Bradley assumed his role as Ontario’s Environment Minister. Canada’s then Conservative Environment Minister Tom McMillan was quoted in one front-page story in a Toronto newspaper saying, in so many words, ‘Just as we were about to kick the ball through the posts, this newcomer kicks it out of the way.’

But Bradley, knowing that without signature there would be no ‘four-party’ agreement’, held his ground.

“I have read (in the press) that the agreement is signed, sealed and delivered,” he said prior to a May, 1986 summit with his counterparts in Washington, D.C. “But it isn’t signed, sealed and delivered as far as I am concerned. When you look at the fact that some six million Canadians are using the water in that river and Lake Ontario for drinking and recreational purposes, I think it would be highly irresponsible for me to sign it unless I am satisfied.”

His stance forced the parties back to the negotiating table until they agreed on a plan that set a goal of reducing concentrations of toxic chemicals in the waters of the Niagara River by at least 50 per cent within 10 years.

On February 4^th, 1987, Bradley and his counterparts in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada sat at a table in Toronto, in front of a room full of newspaper reporters and news cameras and signed that milestone agreement, and within 10 years, continued testing of the waters and wildlife in the Niagara River showed that the 50 per cent reduction target had been met.

Within a decade after that, bald eagles, which had disappeared along the Niagara River corridor due to pollution, were seen nesting along the river’s shores again and fish-eating birds like herring gulls were once again laying eggs healthy enough to see their populations grow.

In his all too brief time as environment minister, from 1985 until the provincial Liberals were defeated in 1990, Bradley earned recognition from the United Nations for taking a Blue Box recycling program that had begun in the Waterloo area and supporting its introduction in every municipality across the province.

With the backing of the Premier at the time, David Peterson, and dozens of environmental groups across Ontario, he also put strong measures and enough resources in place to combat acid rain and to investigate and prosecute industrial polluters of every kind.

Under Jim Bradley’s watch, news reporters across Ontario were invited to the Ministry of Environment offices in their region each year to obtain a list of the top industrial polluters in their communities and to receive detailed accounts of what ministry officers were doing to deal with those polluters.

News releases from the ministry, outlining charges and convictions of polluters became commonplace. 

Nothing remotely close to that kind of transparency when it comes to Environment Ministry activity has existed in Ontario since.

The list of his achievements as Environment Minister in the government of David Peterson go on and on, but I continue to view the role he played in the reduction of chemical poisons in the Niagara River at or at least very near the top of the legacy he has left us – one that will hopefully last for generations to come if we, as people, care enough to make sure it survives.

From October of 2018 until his passing this September 26^th, 2025, Jim Bradley served as Chair of Niagara Region’s council where I believe his greatest gift to the people of Niagara in that role was restoring some decency and civility to regional government after four years of government under Al Caslin and what became known as a “cabal” on the council that reigned with anything but.

At the end of it all, we can all have open and honest discussions on whether or not we agree with some of the decisions Jim Bradley made over his 55 years in public office.

There were a number of times following his years as environment minister in the 1980s and in more recent years when he was serving as Regional Chair,  when I took issue with what he was doing too.

But his record as Ontario’s Environment Minister in the mid-to-late 1980s – a record that had many notables up to and including groups like Greenpeace and scientist, environmental activist and CBC host of ‘The Nature of Things’ David Suzuki calling him the best environment minister Canada has ever had – can never be taken away from him.

We sure could use him or someone like him back in that role now.

Rest In Peace Jim Bradley

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

A Funeral Service in celebration of Jim Bradley’s life will be held Saturday, October 4, 2025, at 1 p.m., at Bethany Community Church (1388 Third Street Louth, St. Catharines), where guests are invited to gather beginning at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, one may consider a donation to the Rankin Cancer Run, Hospice Niagara, Trillium United Church, or a charity of one’s choice. Online condolences at georgedartefuneralhome.com

A Brief Footnote to Readers – If the above tribute has a few typos or doesn’t read as smoothly as it should, I had a hard time writing it as I am still coming to terms with  the news that this person who was always there, even if he was late every now and then, is gone. Doug Draper)

The first story posted on Niagara At Large about Jim Bradley’s passing can be viewed by clicking on – https://niagaraatlarge.com/2025/09/26/niagara-regional-chair-jim-bradley-passes-away/

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