David Johnson (Canadian politician)
politician in Ontario, Canada.
David John Johnson (born December 17, 1945) is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He was the mayor of East York from 1982 to 1993, a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1993 to 1999, and a senior cabinet minister in the government of Mike Harris.
Background
Johnson has a Bachelor of Science degree from McMaster University, and a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. After graduation, he worked at Imperial Oil from 1968 to 1982.
Politics
Municipal
Johnson served as an alderman in East York from 1972 to 1982, and was the mayor of the former Toronto borough from 1982 to 1993. He also served on the Metropolitan Toronto Council from 1978 to 1980 and again from 1982 to 1993.
Provincial
He was elected to the provincial legislature in a by-election held on April 1, 1993, following the death of NDP member Margery Ward in the constituency of Don Mills. Johnson defeated his Liberal opponent, Murad Velshi, by about 3,500 votes.
Johnson was easily re-elected in the 1995 provincial election, in which the Progressive Conservatives won a majority government under Mike Harris. He was appointed as Chair of the Management Board of Cabinet on June 26, 1995, and was also appointed as government house leader on August 16, 1996.
“David Johnson (Canadian politician)” enters the record as politician in Ontario, Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Johnson and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5235692. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1982, 1993 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Johnson (Canadian politician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.