Marguerite Ceschi-Smith

Marguerite Ceschi-Smith is a politician in the Canadian province of Ontario. She is a member of the Brantford City Council, where she has served since 1994. She is also an executive member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). She was re-elected to a sixth term on city council in the 2010 municipal election.

Ceschi-Smith holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees from the University of Guelph and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She operates a heritage property management business with her husband and is a professor at Seneca College.

Ceschi-Smith was first elected to the Brantford City Council in the 1994 municipal election, winning the second seat in the city's fifth ward. She was re-elected in 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2010. In every election since 2000, she has placed first in her two-member ward. She considered running for mayor in 2003, but ultimately chose not to do so.

She is best known for her work promoting the municipal reintegration of brownfield space. Ceschi-Smith first became active with this issue in the late 1990s and early 2000s through efforts to restore a derelict unit on Brantford's Mohawk Street. She has since promoted legislative reform at both the provincial and federal levels, seeking to remove what she describes as "legislative, policy and bureaucratic obstacles" that prevent brownfield redevelopment. In 2006, she also began championing the municipal reclamation of greyfield lands. When running for re-election in 2010, Ceschi-Smith said that she wanted to complete the restoration of the Greenwich-Mohawk brownfield and develop a master plan for protecting Brantford's waterfront.

Ceschi-Smith has been active with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities for several years. In 2010, she was elected to a tenth term on its board of directors. She has chaired the federation's brownfields committee, and she helped develop a national brownfields strategy through her work on the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) Brownfields Taskforce in 2003. In 2007, she was named as the FCM's "eco-councillor" of the year.

Ceschi-Smith was elected as chair of Brantford's corporate services committee in 2005. She has also chaired the NW Gateway Committee and the Brantford Waterfront Master Plan Taskforce. In 2011, she introduced a motion calling for Brantford to rejoin the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) after a one-year absence.

In 2000, Ceschi-Smith opposed plans by Mike Harris's provincial government to introduce private prisons in Ontario. In 2003, she attended the nineteenth United Nations-Habitat Congress in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ceschi-Smith sought the Liberal Party nomination for Brant in the buildup to the 2004 federal election. She lost on the third ballot count to Lloyd St. Amand.

See the 2010 Brantford election page for information on the defeated candidates.

See the 2006 Brantford election page for information on Skelton and Leeallen.

See the 2003 Brantford election page for information on Lucente and Pennell.

See the 2000 Brantford election page for information on MacKeigan.

See the 1997 Brantford election page for information on Karmiris, Corby, and Rattie.

See the 1994 Brantford election page for information on Smith.

Sources: Brantford Expositor, 15 November 1994, p. 7; "City Council," Brantford Expositor, 8 November 2000, D4; Ross Marowits, "Friel rides happiness," Brantford Expositor, 14 November 2000, A3; Vincent Ball, "Council table shake up: Four new faces elected by Brantford voters wanting change," Brantford Expositor, 11 November 2003, A3; Official results (2006): City of Brantford, and Official results (2010), City of Brantford.