Starkey went on to support the University College of the Grand Valley, favouring the vacant Carnegie Library as the right place for its campus: “The opening of Brantford’s ‘University College of the Grand Valley’ is an event of exciting promise. Follow the announcements as they are made. And when the call goes out for volunteers and donations, work hard and dig deep.”7
The Expositor contributed to the momentum with an editorial entitled “School of Hard Knocks.” Observing that “to date the community seems less than inspired by the idea” of a private university, it granted that “It is certainly understandable that there would be a certain amount of healthy skepticism about the plan. For one thing, this is Brantford, where the unofficial motto is “I’ll believe it when they open the doors.”8
The Expositor itself begged to differ: “For decades Brantford has felt inadequate because it lost out during the explosive period of university growth in the 1960s. Subsequent attempts to develop a university presence in Brantford in conjunction with existing universities have largely been unsuccessful. So, if half-measures have failed to work, why not go all the way and dream big — the University College of Grand Valley? There’s little to lose, and the potential rewards are great.”
By the end of 1997, Brantford was abuzz with activity aimed at bringing post-secondary education to the old downtown. While the University Committee worked on the proposal to establish a private university, the Downtown Renewal Group lobbied to move Mohawk College to the vacant Eaton’s mall. The latter had toiled on the details of a proposal for two years. The plan that they proposed was influenced by discussions with Mohawk College, the old YM-YWCA, the mayor, the city, members of the federal and provincial governments, the mall owners, and the public library, which said that it was ready to serve the new location by transforming its undeveloped third floor into a multi-media study space.
Caroline Freibauer, a reporter with an interest in downtown developments, recounted the developments in The Expositor:
…with the downtown economy virtually deflated, yet another group of concerned citizens is crusading for Mohawk’s Elgin Street campus to move into the vacant Eaton Market Square mall.
And despite the many failed attempts at creating a post-secondary presence in the city, this group is just as earnest, committed and unflagging as the crusaders who have gone before.
“If we have a problem, our problem is explaining to the people of Brantford exactly how good a deal this is,” said Frank Matthews, a retired businessman, entrepreneur and member of an informal concerned citizens committee called the Downtown Renewal Group. The group’s long-term objectives are to encourage and bring new initiatives to Brantford’s core. The short-term objective is to make a proposal for a joint Mohawk College and YM-YWCA development work….
Terry Jones, executive director of the YM-YWCA, which is in dire need of a new facility, likes the partnerships a Mohawk plan creates. “It’s a community initiative which addresses our problem with the downtown and our problem with post-secondary education.”1
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